Eldritch, Green, and Freckled

Chapter 10 - Workaholics Galore

WARNINGS: None
Holy ajekfehajk I did not realize how long it's been I'm so sorry, I was going through the tags people add to their bookmarks for all of my works on AO3 so shoutout to the person who let me know that it's been over a year since I last updated this :') (also to the person who put "Surprise! It's Trauma" as one of their bookmark tags, I think about that constantly).
I'm pulling all of these arcs by my memory of the anime so all I know is that next is the internships, this however is just. More support course, I wanted to establish how I think the support course was set up and. Accidentally wrote a whole chapter from Power Loaders POV oops

It took approximately a month into the school  year for Maijima Higari, hero name Power Loader, to give up on trying to limit the music the students were allowed to play on the speakers (and not even a week for him to give up on stopping them from taking over the workshop's speaker system), so between the sounds of power tools that day were songs from an American musical, courtesy of Izuku, that he could only pick out a couple of the English words from (why  those words included lots of "Heather," a disturbing amount of "blue balls," and one instance of "Vietnam" accompanied by mouth-made explosion noises, he didn't think he wanted to know). The second and third year hero course students were wanting their beginning of the year costume upgrades, a job left to the first year support students as upper years tended to work on actual marketable products, or even occasionally ones for heroes that commissioned them.

With a school as exclusive as UA, there was a lot of room for support students to work freely, since their course-specific classes relied mostly on hands on approaches and developing someone's personal style (especially the recurring every year problem of the student who's style was "explosions and smoke." This year, Mei Hatsume had already given him more grief than her predecessors), leaving him mostly to make sure students were working safely and giving them someone to bounce ideas off of. First years got 5 hours of free workshop time a week; usually an hour a day, though sometimes varied depending on education curriculum needs, and he was waiting not-so-patiently for today's to end and his beloved students to become someone else's problem.

Once the last 15 minutes of class came, he stood from his own project at his desk to check in on his students. He preferred to see what they were doing, ask if they wanted help or even just info dump onto him,  as much as possible, and he believed it part of the reason his students were more receptive to his feedback and trusting in him. They didn't always respond, too caught up in what they were doing (such as Iko today, who'd come in with a bag of... human hair? All from the same person, from the looks of it, she must be helping an upperclassman) or unable to articulate what they were doing in any way that made sense to others (a common problem for another of his students, Nishigori, who tended to explain in sound affects and vague gestures about any project he was too excited about), but there'd been many times where someone stayed long after the bell, always beaming at receiving genuine praise that, prior to UA, would've been half assed or completely absent.

He visited Izuku last, since the boy was staying in his apartment that night and could talk all he wanted through the ride back, like he usually did.

Except, this time, he didn't. He was very invested on a project that Maijima hadn't seen before. Upon first glance it appeared to be a collapsible bo staff, wrapped in fabric reminiscent of his coworkers infamous capture weapon. Izuku was currently loading small cartridges, of what he didn't know, into one of the nearly invisible compartments throughout the staff. Scattered across his work desk was metalworking tools (as to be expected), more cartridges in various colors, two or three of the hairs that, Maijima glanced up to check, matched the ones Iko was working on that were marinating in some solution, and a hoodie that was certainly too big for the boy it seemed to be with.

The clothing wasn't that strange in that of itself, often Izuku could be seen with one of his boyfriend's flannels or band shirts, but the specific fact that it was a hoodie, paired with the trembling body (albeit steady hands) and slightly fogged over eyes that could be seen upon looking closer at the boy, hinted that he was getting sick. And refusing to tell anybody.

Izuku had always been sickly, no doubt in part due to the malnourishment and tough conditions he faced as a child, but he insisted on working through it most of the time until he was physically unable to do so. Maijima usually didn't deal with it when Izuku was like this, other than passing on the message that the boy was well on his way to a crash, and he hoped it wouldn't start now; he felt barely prepared enough to take care of himself in general, often pushing past his own limits without knowing.

He'd keep Nemuri's number at the top of his phone. Just in case.

[A/N: I think the support course would be more on the small side, partially because I don't think as many people would want to go into that field, and because even less would qualify to get into UA's (I imagine they need to have a base level of experience in engineering as well in some way. We already know UA has classist and quirkist biases just like everywhere else in the BNHA world, and while quirk wouldn't matter as much in support, class may be more obvious. Plus, as great as Mei is, she very likely couldn't've made all of the equipment she did by the sports festival if they also had to spend time focusing on basic safety and engineering), like 10 per class? Also because support workers aren't expended as easily and quickly as heroes, so demand isn't as high. Anyways, I set myself up a segue into the next chapter that I. Definitely was not originally planning on having to introduce my chronically ill Izuku agenda but whatever. It could certainly make my future plans more fun. Until next time, which I promise will be this year dghjakhfjkd]