Someone’s probably really missing you right now.
Hitoshi snapped shut the watch cover and gave it a gentle shake of determination before putting it away in his messenger bag front pocket, which he decided was a safer place than his hoodie pocket. The bus squealed to a stop and Hitoshi exited towards his bookstore/studio apartment. The lights in the shop were still on and he could see the familiar blonde hair of his co-worker bobbing to some song in his earbuds.
He turned the open sign around to closed and locked the door for the evening before giving Monoma a friendly tap on the shoulder to alert him to his presence. Monoma nodded his chin to him and removed an earbud.
“How’d it go?” Monoma asked passively as he continued putting books on the shelf in front of him. Hitoshi plopped into a plush and perfectly broken-in leather chair with a dramatic sigh.
“That bad, huh?” Monoma quipped.
“You have excellent academics, and your recommendations are impressive, Mr. Shinsou but, blah blah blah…” Shinsou said in a mocking tone.
“They like me on paper, then they meet me, and it goes to shit. You’d think with a quirk that requires I talk to people that I’d be fucking good at it by now.”
“Yeah you’d think that. It doesn’t help that you are chronically in need of a nap, and you never use product in your hair. And you wore a ratty old hoodie and jeans to the interview. Oh and—”
“Noted, Mo.” Shinsou rubbed his face hoping to revive it of its perpetual state of fatigue. Monoma was right, of course. He had tried to help Hitoshi get ready for the grad school interview by going through his wardrobe only to become frustrated that every item was either a black t shirt or a black hoodie. As Monoma reached the very back of the closet, he stumbled upon Shinsou’s hero costume. It hadn’t been retired long enough to gather dust quite yet, but its pitiful forgotten state in the back of the closet brought a stab of pain to both men. Surely, Monoma’s costume was in a similar state in his own closet. They’d exchanged a knowing look and moved on without speaking of it. It felt wrong to acknowledge what had happened to the heroes so soon, the wound was still raw.
With the war only having ended three years before, right as Shinsou and Monoma’s graduating class was walking across the stage at UA Hero Academy, society was still healing. Being a hero meant something very different. There were no more agencies, no more commercials or product sponsorships. Heroes were held accountable for their actions, thanks to the dramatic unfolding of the Todoroki story. The abuse and neglect the Todoroki children suffered under Endeavor’s fist and fury were the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
UA closed its doors permanently, along with every other “hero academy”. Quirks, it was finally revealed, were actually a virus as so many people had theorized. Children began displaying signs of dangerous and unstable quirk combinations at earlier and earlier ages. There were talks of compulsory quirk removal via a drug being touted as a vaccine, but everyone knew it was formulated after the arrest of Dr. Garaki and the seizure of his research, which led to mass revolt against it.
The day the vaccine was announced in the morning news, Shinsou immediately thought of Operation Paperclip after WWII. The United States Government secretly hired Nazi scientists in order to steal Germany’s substantial progress in technology at the time.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, he thought.
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