Aizawa glared at the lone gray hair sticking out from his scalp. It was only natural, after watching his students enter the front lines against an entire villain organization and cap it off with an all or nothing deathmatch against the boogeyman of Japan for the fate of the world.
Yet, for all that his previous class had literally driven him to gray hairs and late-night espresso binges, he wouldn't have traded them for the world. All of them had far surpassed his expectations, whether they continued their meteoric rise in the hero industry or retired to a quieter life.
And now, it was time for a new class.
Aizawa loaded up on espresso shots and jelly packs in the break room. Rationally, he knew his new batch of first-year students wouldn't cause nearly as much trouble as last year's 1-A, but habit had him preparing for stressful days and sleepless nights.
Hizashi sidled up to him as he closed the fridge. "So, new year, new batch of kids to terrorize, eh? Or did you finally decide to go sober after a whole year without expulsions?"
Aizawa rolled his eyes. "You really shouldn't bet so much of your money away."
Hizashi's face fell. "Oh come on, you and I both know you would've expelled each and every one of them a hundred times over had you not gotten weirdly attached to them. You owe me! So please, just let me know, if you value me as your friend-"
"I'm regretting that word every second you're in my presence."
"Rude! What would-"
Oboro's name nearly slipped out by habit. The reminder of what truly befell their old friend soured the break room's atmosphere.
"I have a reputation to keep," Aizawa said, forcefully changing the subject. "Can't have people thinking I've gone soft after last year. And I still have a whole stack of paperwork from the HPSC that they've been badgering me about all summer."
Present Mic winked. "Between us then." He ran out of the room, shouting, "Put me down for another mass expulsion, day one!"
Aizawa chuckled as he downed his espresso like a whiskey shot. Then eyed the empty cup and considered adding alcohol. With a sigh, he put all thoughts of inebriated bliss behind him and went to meet his new students.
One would think that the world nearly ending would instill a sense of urgency and respect for the hero profession. If anything, this batch of students was even worse than he remembered. One minute after the class started, and without any apparent teacher supervision, he had a shoving contest in the front row, a group of students giggling over a meme on a phone, one delinquent trying to lift a girl's skirt without them noticing, and another doodling a dick onto their desk in permanent marker.
Aizawa groaned, stood up still wrapped in his sleeping bag, and stretched his arms in a huge fake yawn. He blearily scratched at his five o' clock shadow and gazed around the room.
"Huh?" He said, voice slurred. "How'd I end up here?"
One of the front row students snickered. "Dude, it's some homeless guy. Do you think he's drunk?"
Another whispered, "What if that's our teacher?"
Aizawa made a mental note. Skinny, short, aquatic mutation with crustacean features. Glasses over eyestalks, need to make a note to get contacts for the kid. Those eyestalks make swiping the frames far too easy.
"That hobo? You think U.A. would let a bum like that guy teach? Get real."
The student sauntered up. Large, broad shouldered, generic strength enhancement. He sneered at Aizawa and said, "Listen, gutter trash, you're a little lost. You need to clear out before I make you."
Aizawa swayed on his feet and squinted at the student. "You aren't the boss of me. This is a free country, I can walk wherever I want, pipsqueak."
A vein throbbed on the teen's forehead. "Alright, you asked for it!"
He pushed at Aizawa. Aizawa grabbed his wrists, hooked a leg behind his knee, then leveraged him into a brain-rattling headbutt. With the kid stunned, Aizawa wrenched him around, slammed him by the neck onto his desk, and pulled out a pen with his free hand. The class went dead quiet as he pressed the pen against the boy's jugular.
Talking in his best authoritative voice, Aizawa asked, "Can anyone tell me what he did wrong?"
You could hear a pin drop in the silence. Aizawa knew that because one of the students, with patches of cloth like a patchwork puppet, held together with glimmering red silk, had dropped the sewing needle she was twirling between her fingers. Even the student pinned underneath him didn't dare struggle, not with the point of the pen cold against his throat.
"Well?" Aizawa asked. "I'm waiting."
The crustacean kid timidly held up one claw. "Ah, he escalated the situation and got close to a stranger when he should have tried to alert the staff?"
"Good. You're not getting expelled today. Anyone else?"
At the implied threat of expulsion, the floodgates opened. Some of the answers were more practical, like not checking for weapons or going up to him alone, others were grasping for straws at things like he should have sniffed to make sure Aizawa was actually drunk. It wasn't the answers that Aizawa wanted, but the speculation, the thinking. The League of Villains might be no more, but there were still plenty of threats that would kill them out in the real world if they didn't use their noggins.
He saved the student pinned under him for last. The student grunted out, "I should have punched you instead."
"Oh really?" Aizawa asked. He let the kid up. "Why don't you try it and see if it works?"
The kid looked back, as if looking for support. A sea of haunted and wary faces stared back. The kid sized him up, visibly calculating his odds, all the while grinding his teeth to nubs. With a loud frustrated growl, the kid turned around and plodded to his seat.
"As heroes, you will be faced with many situations like this one. Vagrants sleeping on sidewalks, drunk men picking fights, lost children, wild animals, and more. Your hero studies course will explore these scenarios and teach you how best to handle them. Until then, you are not to get involved in any potentially dangerous situations. Is that clear?"
"Yes sensei," the class said in a discordant chorus.
"Good." Aizawa plopped a bag of athletic uniforms on his desk. "Get dressed in these and meet me outside."
"But what about-"
Aizawa dipped out the window. He lingered outside to see how quickly the class got into motion. To his disappointment, they approached the clothes without the slightest bit of urgency and bickered over which uniform to take, as if they weren't tailored to their individual sizes and didn't have names sewed into the collars.
Once the students trickled onto the practice field, Aizawa handed the muscled kid a baseball. It didn't take much to get them all excited to cut loose with their Quirks, and Aizawa waited expectantly for one of them to tee him up. He wasn't disappointed.
"Finally! I've been dying to cut loose with my Quirk! I'm gonna leave all you losers in the dust!"
Well, it wasn't quite the prettiest pitch, but Aizawa could get a couple bases with it.
"It seems the gravity of your chosen profession hasn't sunk in yet. If you're not going to take this seriously, then I'll just have to up the stakes." Aizawa gave them a deadpan scowl and said, "Whoever ranks the lowest out of the twenty of you will be expelled."
The muscle-brained kid with a pen indentation on his neck got the collective scowls of his classmates trained on him. He scoffed. "Good riddance, I say. Not like I'm going to get anything but first anyways."
Huh. Seems like the first time more people got motivated by trying to beat out someone than saving their own hides. Maybe he should try it again next year.
"If you're that confident," Aizawa said, "I could always expel you if you don't come in first."
He expected the kid to back down, but instead, he bulked up his arms and said, "Bring it on! I can take them all!"
Aizawa took a deep breath, reminded himself that he had resolved not to expel anybody this year, then said, "Good luck with that."
As the kid nearly burst a vein - he might have to slip Recovery Girl a note - Aizawa corralled the now thoroughly cowed students through the assessment exercises. This lot had largely disappointed him with their lack of imagination. A student who could make his limbs behave like springs didn't even bother trying to use them for the side-hop, and patchwork girl threw her baseball normally instead of making a sling with her thread.
The exercise ended with a teary-eyed, sniveling crustacean kid in dead last, with clumsy softball throws and awkward leg movement hampering any running and jumping exercises subtracting too much from the decent grip score. At least this time, Aizawa had a better excuse for not expelling anyone than that logical ruse B.S. he ran with last time. Muscle kid also looked very nervous, with an embarrassing fifth place after getting gassed sprinting for the stamina test.
"I mentioned earlier that whoever came in last place would be expelled," Aizawa said. "It would be awkward with only nineteen people in class, but we could make it work."
Muscle kid brightened, while the crustacean metaphorically and literally hunched into their shell.
"Kanata. You got last place overall." After holding the glare for a few seconds, he said, "Luckily for you, I gave you a pass for the day for answering first and answering well during the scenario I ran you through. So long as you work to improve your shortcomings, you have no reason to leave my class."
The look he got gave him a strong bout of déjà vu. He had a feeling he already knew who would be this year's problem child. As for this year's Bakugo, he looked as though the world had fallen out from under his feet as Aizawa turned his attention to him.
"Kenji. Thus far, you have been disruptive, brash, and reckless. You showed a concerning lack of empathy for a presumed 'homeless bum' and your first instinct was to use force. There is far more to hero work than a Quirk, and if that is all you have, then I will have to remove you from my class for your own good."
As tears welled up in their eyes, Aizawa bit down the old habit to tell him to pack his things. Underneath the brash exterior, now that Aizawa looked closer, he could see the vulnerable, lost child who had never been taught better.
"That said, I never agreed to expel you for not coming in first. If I was going to expel you, it would have been for the attempted physical assault and I wouldn't have bothered making you go through this assessment."
Kenji had the decency to look ashamed of himself at that. Aizawa eased up on the pressure, saying, "I advise that you pay attention in Ethics class, and take those lessons to heart. That goes for the rest of you as well. I also suggest that you all have a chat with the school's in-house therapist Hound Dog. Even if you don't have anything personally wrong with you, he's a great source of advice for helping other people in the field. Not every problem can be solved with a punch. Class dismissed."
Leaving them all on that note, Aizawa went back to class to collect his things. He rummaged around his desk, trying to find his stash of jelly packs, when he stumbled upon an old, crumpled, blood-flecked piece of paper. Toshinori had come and gone, but his words that day still lingered with him. Aizawa held up the expulsion form. He wondered what would have happened had he gone through with it. Would everyone still have survived the USJ? Would the attack at the summer camp never have happened, or would the villains have targeted someone else? Would there even be a Japan still left without a full roster of 1-A students?
Aizawa ripped up the expulsion form and tossed the scraps in the garbage. "It's our job to teach," he told himself.
He heard a crunch of fist against carapace and a shout of, "Get out of my face, crab!" Aizawa took a deep breath. "It's our job to teach. It's our job to teach."
When that didn't quite smother the urge to dig that expulsion form out of the trash and tape it together, Aizawa told himself, "Think of how mad Hizashi will be when he loses the bet."
A/N: and that's a wrap! This story mainly came about because Aizawa expelling an entire class had been stewing in my brain. It's such a wild worldbuilding detail that's never followed up on, alongside other gems like Bakugo's death threats, the HPSC having a hitman hiding in its closet, and the MLA having an entire goddamn city full of die-hard fanatics. So, the story was largely to explore an Aizawa with an attitude more in line with that little detail and give him some character development away from that. Hope you all enjoyed it, and see you for whatever else I make next.