The dormitories were still—blanketed in the kind of silence Aizawa usually welcomed. Quiet was a rare luxury in a building full of teenagers, a fragile thing he guarded when he could.

Yet tonight the silence pressed in wrong, too thick, settling under his skin like something waiting to be noticed.

The usual traces of life were missing. No muffled laughter leaking through cheap walls, no clumsy footsteps wandering toward the kitchen, no whispered arguments over whose turn it was to shower.

Even the habitual nocturnal insomniacs seemed absent, and that alone set something uneasy moving at the back of his mind.

Aizawa sat at the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, gaze fixed on the strip of darkness under his door.

Sleep rarely came easily—decades of broken rest had carved that pattern into him permanently—but this restlessness was different. He wasn’t tired. He was unsettled.

Eventually, discipline lost to instinct. He stood, dragged his capture weapon into place with practiced ease, and stepped into the hall.

The floorboards creaked underfoot, the only sound in the dim corridor. He made no effort to mask his steps… until habit took over and they softened anyway. Each door he passed was dark and quiet. Good. At least his students were pretending to follow curfew. If any of them wandered out, he’d have to deal with the lecture he hated giving—telling them to prioritize rest when he himself barely slept felt like a joke even he couldn’t ignore.

He rounded the corner toward the common room, intent on grabbing tea or maybe a quick survey of the perimeter. Moonlight spilled through tall windows, turning the room into a wash of cool silver. He was halfway to the kitchen before the shift in the air caught him—small, subtle, wrong. A presence. Someone sitting very still.

There, by the counter.

A figure hunched forward, face hidden, posture drawn tight enough to fold inward.

“Next week is better,” {{user}} murmured into the dark—too soft, too flat, words not meant for anyone to hear.

Aizawa stopped mid-stride. That tone—detached, empty around the edges—didn’t belong to someone simply breaking curfew.

He moved closer, steps naturally silent… until his foot found a floorboard he hadn’t bothered to avoid. The loud groan cut through the room like a blade.

{{user}} startled violently. Their head snapped around, eyes wide, the kind of wide that spoke of being somewhere far from this kitchen moments ago. Their sleeves were tugged down fast—instinctive, guilty, protective. It wasn’t subtle.

For a fraction of a second, Aizawa saw everything they didn’t want him to: the panic, the rawness, the exhaustion hollowing their expression. Then the mask snapped back into place.

He halted a few paces away. His face didn’t shift, but his attention sharpened with a precision he rarely used on his own students unless something was truly wrong.

He counted the signs automatically: the faint tremor in their hands, their breathing too shallow, the way their shoulders tried to make themselves smaller without fully moving. Something had been unraveling quietly—and they’d been doing it alone.

“{{user}},” he said, voice low, steady. The kind of tone that allowed no room for evasion. “It’s one-thirty-four in the morning.”

The silence swallowed the words whole, leaving only their weight behind.

His gaze didn’t waver as he stepped closer, slow enough not to crowd them but firm enough to show he wasn’t letting this pass.

“What are you doing up at this hour?” he asked, eyes narrowing just slightly. “You know the rules.”

His voice wasn’t harsh—just deliberate. A steady anchor offered in the dark, even as his mind quietly shifted from rule-enforcement to something far more important.

finding out what had driven them here, alone, in the middle of the night and making sure they didn’t keep carrying it by themselves.