Sound of Silence (Aizawa X OC)

Ch. 14: Misunderstood

-----Shouta's POV-----

The entire time that Shinobu was telling that story to her mentee, I had stopped myself from jumping down there and interrupting her story, and found myself having to walk away to avoid confronting her in front of her student as soon as the story was done. Her motivations for being a hero went against my morals and what I believed a hero should be. Don't get me wrong. I still had a lot of respect for Shinobu, but that kind of thinking can lead to people being hurt or even killed.

Though I know it's highly irrational, I felt a bit hurt and betrayed by her shallow motivation. When you let someone close to you, it's inevitable that they will disappoint you or hurt you even if it's unintentional, which is a major reason as to why I don't typically do relationships or let people close to me. So right now, I felt hurt and irritated that I had let myself become so attached to the silver-haired heroine in such a short amount of time.

By the time I snapped out of my mental scolding of myself, I realized the time. It was getting close to patrol time, and the last thing I needed was to be late because of her taking up all of my concentration.

----Time skip to the patrol, on a rooftop (Still Shouta's POV)----

We were now staking out a supposed drug deal that was supposed to be happening in the Kamino Ward. It had been nearly 2 hours since we had settled into this position on the rooftop, and I had yet to say a word to Shinobu. To most people, that would seem perfectly normal and part of my personality, but Shinobu was different. I would normally at least ask her how she was doing or insist that she treat the black eye or split lip she had acquired since the last time I saw her. While I did notice these things, I found myself too irritated from earlier to comment.

If her focus was in the right place, she might have been able to focus enough to avoid those. Yes, those thoughts are unfair to her and highly irrational, but at the moment, I didn't care. If these feelings were going to make me act irrational and get close to her, I'd let them be irrational and push her away for now. After all, I didn't know if I could handle all of these emotions that came from romantic feelings for another person.

"What's wrong, Eraser?" Shinobu's soft, lyrical voice asked, using an abbreviated form of my hero name since we were both in our hero costumes. Not wanting to let myself break at her soft tone and no doubt worried chartreuse eyes, I answered while continuing to watch the men below us.

"Why did you become a hero?" I asked, my voice much more accusatory than I meant to let out, and I saw her features darken to a less concerned and more stoic expression.

"You shouldn't eavesdrop on my mentoring sessions," she responded, her voice quiet but hardened in a way that attempted to hide emotions, but some seeped through. She's angry? Betrayed? Well that's two of us.

"You shouldn't be telling motivations like that to an impressionable student."

"And why is that?"

"Your goal is the kind that's irrational and gets people killed."

At my last reply, Shinobu was silent, which wasn't uncommon for her, but there was something different about this silence. There was a tension in it that was typically absent from her quiet demeanor.

"...what do you know about my motivations?..." she finally asked, her voice thick but still barely above a whisper after a couple of minutes, her gaze now also trained on the happenings below us. Another car had pulled up. It looked like if anything was going to happen with this supposed drug deal, it was going to happen soon.

"I know you'll never accomplish it. You have a quirk that most of the public would see as villainous. You can't control what people think. To believe otherwise is the peak of irrationality," I responded, my tired blunt voice that I almost never use with her coming back full force, "Heroes should be motivated and dedicated to keeping people safe, not selfish whims."