Deku's Secret Illness

Ch.4

There was something wrong with Izuku Midoriya. Aizawa knew it, he just couldn't put his finger on it. So he watched, and watched, and he came up empty. The alarms started going off about a year ago. It was different then. He could tell Midoriya was emotionally raw, that something had happened that hurt him. He could tell he was grieving and he had the sensitivity to know not to ask. He could tell the kid was depressed and that Bakugou knew what happened and he trusted that his student would come to him if he needed help dealing with it. He had asked Bakugou then and he elaborated that there had been a death in the family. All normal things. It must have been someone the kid was really close to. Aizawa was no stranger to grief. He's seen grief before so he wasn't as concerned as he should have been.

Then one day the kid came to class completely broken. He had passed it off as the kid being sick, he had prayed that that was all this was, but then it stuck around. He was conflicted. The trust Midoriya had in him was paper thin, as it was with most adults. Aizawa wasn't naive. He knew the kid didn't trust adults. It was obvious. It was also obvious that he trusted Aizawa more than a lot of the other adults in his life. It took a lot but he had finally managed to get midoriya to come to him for any injuries that could have been concealed. At the beginning of the year the kid would just hide them until they were inevitably healed when he ended up hurting himself bad enough to require Recovery girl's quirk, which happened on a pretty frequent basis back then. He could tell that trust had grown. It was slow and it was slight, but it was there. So when he tried to ask the kid what was wrong only to get another bullshit excuse where midoriya explains that nothing is wrong and he's fine Aizawa decided not to push it.

He regrets that now.

Whatever is wrong with Midoriya it's getting worse. His schoolwork is suffering, he's slowing down during training and Aizawa can tell it's not from lack of effort. He could see how labored midoriya's breathing had become. He tried his best to ignore the obvious pain midoriya was in when he used his quirk because he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He had no evidence and pushing Midoriya to open up about something he couldn't even prove was happening was only going to make things worse.
So he watched. He watched and watched and watched. He saw more than he ever wanted to. He saw his student suffering. He just didn't know how to help. He didn't know what to do. It was keeping him up at night.
So there he was, another sleepless night spent alone in his office digging through Midoriya's file for the millionth time in the hopes he could find something, anything to hold onto. He knew midoriya got his quirk from All Might, so he went to him over and over again, begging for any information that would give him a lead. He wanted to help his student. Then it happened- he found his first clue. Midoriya collapsed during training that day. He collapsed into a fit of coughs. He played it off as a cold, but the cough stuck around. It clicked. Midoriya wasn't lying when he said he was sick, that much was clear, but he might be lying about just how sick he is.
So he did his research. He studied his student, marked down symptoms, combed through every incident report within the past year to see where it may have started, found one a few weeks before it all started, and dug a bit deeper. It was a particularly odd incident, a fairly innocent quirk that just happened to interact strangely with Midoriya's. No one really saw what happened, but Midoriya was admitted to the hospital with extensive internal bleeding but no sign as to how it happened. Everything about it was wrong. There was only one person he knew of who could help him figure this out.
Recovery Girl.

He stood outside her office that day fidgeting with his scarf just like he had when he was an anxious kid getting another lecture from her during his time at UA. Except this time it wasn't him and the stakes seemed exponentially higher. He had in his hand a copy of the incident report with Midoriya's name redacted. The plan was simple; present the case to her and ask what her professional opinion was, ask what she thought could have caused the damage the hero had experienced and how that may affect the hero long term