Heroics and Other Things

Chapter 21: Spin Control

The next day dawned miraculously clear for how dark it had been the night before. The alley where they'd fought Stain had seemed a place of perpetual midnight, but the sun on Shouto's face as he woke from a light, fitful doze was warm and bright. As he looked around the room at his friends their cuts and bruises from the fight looked more severe in daylight, but that might have just been because they were covered in thick layers of bandages. The pad on his cheek felt heavy, and he felt the weight of it more keenly than he had felt the cut itself.

"Did you sleep Izuku?" Shouto asked, sliding his legs over the side of his bed so he could face the others.

"No, not really," Izuku admitted, in a subdued voice. He had been hurt the worst of all of them, but he was sitting up in bed, even if he was clearly trying not to jostle his injured leg.

"I figured," Shouto agreed. "Me neither."

"I slept great," Hitoshi chimed in, then stretched into a huge yawn. "Apparently all I need to sleep is to tire myself with complete, life-threatening terror."

"You picked a good career for it," Izuku pointed out, and Hitoshi and Iida both laughed lightly.

Shouto found himself smiling slightly as well. Leave it to Hitoshi to break the awkwardness of the moment with a joke, and Izuku to be there with the follow-through. Even with the bruise blossoming over half Hitoshi's face where he'd hit his head on the sidewalk when Stain had broken free of his capture weapon, and the damage to Izuku's leg from where Stain had jammed a knife into his calf, the two of them were in good spirits.

Izuku looked up at the ceiling contemplatively. "Thinking about that fight now, we did something pretty amazing."

"Yeah, I agree," Shouto replied.

"After everything that happened back there, it kinda feels like a miracle we're even alive," Izuku said, then looked down at his injured leg. "With my leg messed up, I was an easy target. He probably could have killed me if he really wanted-"

"Don't be dumb," Hitoshi cut him off. "He was going to commit a murder in that alley, and you stopped him. Whether he meant to murder you or someone else doesn't matter. You still won."

"We still won," Shouto corrected him.

Hitoshi looked over at him in surprise. "I meant you too-"

"No, I mean all of us," Shouto said, shaking his head but keeping eye contact with Hitoshi. "Every one of us in that alley had a part to play, you included. The victory belongs to all of us."

A blush stole across Hitoshi's cheeks, and he looked down. "I-"

"It's true," Iida interrupted, before Hitoshi could deny his involvement any further. "I can't . . . I owe all of you . . ."

Before Iida could finish the door to their hospital room slid open. Shouto and the others looked over to see Manual, Eraserhead and Junebug standing out in the hallway. Present Mic wasn't with them, but Shouto assumed he was still being treated elsewhere in the hospital. He probably wasn't fit to be out of bed and scolding his student just yet.

"So you're all awake," Aizawa said, glaring around the room with an eye of indiscriminate irritation, like he'd just walked in on the class and not one of them was in their proper seat.

Shouto bowed his head. "Junebug," he said respectfully.

"And Manual too," Iida said, real anxiety in his voice.

Nearer to the door, Hitoshi and Izuku both bowed their heads as well.

"I think it goes without saying that you're all in a lot of trouble," Aizawa went on. "Before I go into how UA is going to handle the consequences for your actions, the four of you have a visitor."