The elective filled before the bell, bodies folding into a circle that wasn't quite a circle—too many elbows, too much eagerness. The floor cushions complained. The air did not. Aizawa leaned against the doorframe, scarf loose, expression neutral in the way that means I am grading the room.
Renya set a small kitchen timer on the floor and didn't wind it. "Homework from last time," he said. "Bring me a moment where hesitation helped—or hurt."
Hands rose, then fell, then rose again. They had learned not to perform. That alone felt like a curriculum.
Yaoyorozu spoke first. "Helped. I paused in the stairwell during patrol. Heard breathing behind a door. Turned out to be a cat. If I'd kicked it in, I would have scared an old woman half to death."
"Good," Renya said. "What did you lose by waiting?"
"Nothing," she said. "Except the story I would have told about being decisive."
"Also good," he said.
A boy from General Studies they'd poached for the elective raised a hand. "Hurt," he said, too quickly. "A delivery drone fell. I froze. My friend got clipped by the crate. It wasn't serious, but I keep replaying it. If I had moved—"
"You learned to move," Renya said, not kind, not cruel. "That's what bodies are for after they hesitate."
They worked the circle. Ten small confessions. Ten tiny repairs.
Then Kai lifted his hand.
He was new to the course, a transfer with a careful walk and a voice that sounded like it remembered being loud and didn't deserve to be anymore. The room quieted not because it knew him, but because it recognized a sentence that had been heavy in a pocket too long.
"I waited too long," he said. "Yesterday."
Aizawa's eyes went to him. He did not interrupt.
"Crosswalk," Kai continued. "Man in a suit kept stepping into the lane, muttering into his phone, cars braking. I remembered what we said in the drills about letting the city teach itself and about not installing ourselves everywhere. I thought maybe someone else would—" He swallowed. "He tripped. Nothing terrible. Scraped hands, bruised pride. I helped him after. But for that second, I wasn't a person. I was homework. I was trying to pass a class."
No one rushed to comfort him. They let the truth breathe.
Renya crouched to meet Kai's eyes at level. "Thank you," he said. "That's the cost."
"I didn't want—" Kai began.
"You didn't want to become the thing you were warned about," Renya said. "The over-eager fix. The unsafe savior. And you tilted too far the other way."
Kai nodded, shame sitting squarely on his shoulders like a bag that had to be carried before it could be put down.
"Okay," Renya said to the room. "We correct. Not by formula. By practice." He looked back to Kai. "After class, come with me."
Aizawa's gaze flicked to Renya: Be a teacher. Renya nodded: I will.
They walked the city with no destination and one instruction.
"If you see chance, take it," Renya said. "Don't audit it. Don't narrate it. We'll talk after."
Kai kept both hands out of his pockets like he was afraid of drawing too fast. They crossed an intersection, paused under a shade awning that did not understand how to be helpful, watched a delivery cyclist wobble and right himself. No heroics asked. No heroics offered.
A block later, a shopping bag tore and apples rolled like choices. Kai lunged, caught two, missed three. A stranger caught the rest. The owner laughed, thanked them both, handed Kai an apple as payment. He stared at the fruit like someone had given him a verdict.
"That's it," Renya said.
"That was nothing," Kai said.
"That was practice," Renya said.
They kept walking. At a bus stop, a toddler reached toward a trash can opening big enough to be an adventure. A mother, dead on her feet, missed it. Kai didn't think; he crouched, changed the angle of the world with two fingers and a smile. The toddler reconsidered. The mother mouthed thank you without drama.
Two small acts. The kind that don't trend. The kind that change how a day ends.
They bought barley tea from a kiosk that counted coins slower than the clock. They sat on low steps outside a clinic whose sign had learned to speak kindly to people without money. For four minutes and then another four, neither spoke.
"Permission to call that enough," Renya said.
Kai exhaled. "I thought your lessons would be… bigger."
"They are," Renya said. "They just fit in smaller spaces than you were taught to respect."
"Then why did I wait yesterday?" Kai asked. "If the answer is this simple?"
"Because it isn't simple," Renya said. "Because there are days when not intervening is dignity, and days when it's cowardice, and the difference is rarely labeled. You'll miss. Today you didn't." He stood. "Come on. We have another student to find."
"Who?" Kai asked.
"The other extreme," Renya said. "The one who's making you look cautious just by existing."
They found her exactly where rumors said she'd be: three blocks from campus, back alley, pop-up clinic hours posted in chalk. Hoshi, first-year from 1-B, Quirk: microvector tweaking—tiny pushes to angles and trajectories. She had discovered that with enough practice she could "nudge" outcomes in subtle ways—coffee cups that didn't spill, keys that didn't miss pockets, feet that found steps. She called it "helping." Others called it "living people's lives for them."
She stood with hands behind her back, watching a city without asking if it wanted to be watched. Her hair was up in a knot that meant I have taken responsibility for the next five meters.
"Hoshi," Renya said.
She flinched—just a fraction; then she turned, smile bright enough to preempt criticism. "Senpai."
He nodded to the chalkboard. POP-UP RESCUE PRACTICE – FRIENDLY TWEAKS ONLY. Beneath, a list of rules someone had written that sounded like a safety pamphlet wearing lipstick: No body contact. No mind control. If someone says stop, stop. The last line had a heart drawn where a period should have been. The heart didn't help.
"You're running a clinic," Renya said.
"An experiment," she corrected. "Like your class, but practical. Tiny adjustments. Good outcomes. Low risk. It's… fun."
Kai glanced at him: teacher look, not friend look. Renya read his thought. She could be me if I'd leaned the other way. He filed it; teaching is sometimes future-proofing.
"What happens when outcomes learn to rely on you?" Renya asked.
Hoshi shrugged. "Then I'll be there. Isn't that the point?"
"Only if you don't plan on sleeping," he said. "Or dying."
"I don't plan on either," she said, too fast.
A passerby dropped a pen. It bounced once and landed in their direction. Hoshi twitched a finger. The pen found its owner's hand as if it had remembered an appointment. The owner laughed, not surprised, grateful to someone and no one, and kept walking.
"You see?" Hoshi said. "Harmless."
"Now make a rule," Renya said. "No tweaks for ten minutes."
She blinked. "Why?"
"Because you won't be here forever," he said.
Her jaw set under the bright. "If this is a lecture about dependency—"
"It's a lecture about grief," he said. "Yours, when you realize you taught a street to need you."
She rolled a shoulder. "It's just alignment."
"Words don't sterilize outcomes," he said. "Pause the clinic."
She looked at Kai, then back at him. "Is this official?"
"No," Renya said. "It's neighborly."
Hoshi's brightness dimmed—not anger; shame. "I thought I was doing what you wanted," she said, and there it was—the hazard of being an example. People build temples to the parts of you that scared you most and then pray for permission to repeat them.
"What I want," he said carefully, "is for you to be good at leaving. And for the city to be okay when you do."
She swallowed. "So… no clinic."
"Clinic later," he said. "First: practice without your gift."
She stared. "That's handicapping."
"That's hero work," he said. "Otherwise your gift is the hero, and you're a technician."
He thought she might explode. Instead, she laughed once, sharp, honest. "Okay," she said. "Ten minutes. No tweaks. If blood spills, it's on you."
"It always is," he said, and set his phone timer where she could see it and hate it.
They watched the street do what streets do—trip and catch themselves. A cyclist stumbled and recovered without aid. A door stuck; someone kicked it; it opened. A child cried because sugar had been denied. A small dog found a gap in a fence and then discovered that freedom feels larger than intention; its owner coaxed it back with the old trick: kneeling to make the world smaller. The timer ticked. Nothing terrible happened. Something better did: people solved their own lives.
Hoshi looked smaller. Not diminished. Human.
"Again tomorrow," Renya said. "Same ten minutes. Longer, when you're ready."
"What if someone gets hurt while I wait?" she asked.
"Then you fix that," he said. "But don't preempt everything for fear of that one thing."
She nodded, a weight she had chosen to carry. She rubbed the chalk heart off the rules. When she rewrote the period, it looked like a period. He preferred it.
"Thank you," she said, not grateful, but respectful.
"Don't thank me," he said. "Practice. And tell your classmates this is invitation, not doctrine."
Hoshi saluted in a way that mocked salutes and honored them anyway. "Sir, yes, sir," she said, and he let it pass; self-mockery keeps humility from becoming a stunt.
When they walked away, Kai asked, "Is she going to listen?"
"She just did," Renya said. "That's how you start."
By afternoon, the elective's inbox had three messages from Commission observers asking for learning objectives and assessment rubrics. Aizawa forwarded them to Nezu with the single word decorative and a smiling emoticon that looked suspiciously like a threat.
Renya wrote nothing back. He printed one email, folded it twice, and used it as a bookmark in a borrowed book about first responders. Some bureaucracy deserves to become a reminder to finish the chapter.
He visited Aki after closing. The shop smelled like citrus and relief. Natsume was counting coins with the intensity of a spy. Aki had a notebook open to a list titled Things We Don't Fix.
"Today?" she asked.
"Two students," he said. "One waited too long. One didn't wait at all."
She poured tea that didn't apologize for being hot. "So you taught both to be bored."
"Close," he said. "I taught them to be useful without being necessary."
"Ambitious," she said, smiling. "That's my favorite flavor of modesty."
He told her about Kai's apple and Hoshi's chalkboard. She told him about a Quiet Rooms thread where someone confessed to walking away from a stranger who needed help and someone else confessed to helping so much they got in the way. The thread ended with: We meet Thursday in the park. Bring chairs. Bring a minute of silence for your mistake. She underlined bring chairs twice. Chairs had become a symbol that didn't need a manifesto.
"You're doing it," she said. "Teaching without making clones."
"I'm trying," he said. "It's slow."
"Good," she said. "Speed kills nuance."
He took the last of the tea and thought about the word teacher like it might be a costume that fit.
The call came from Imai at dusk. "We had an incident," she said.
He froze without showing it. "Real?"
"Contained," she said. "But it'll be on feeds by morning. A trainee intervened too soon. Property damage. No injuries. Cameras love broken glass."
"Name?"
She hesitated. "Hoshi."
He closed his eyes. The day rearranged itself around that word. "Tell me."
"New district. Different pattern. A street vendor tripped. Her cart went toward the curb. Hoshi nudged it back—too hard. It hit a bench. Shattered a window. No one hurt. But it'll trend like an ethics failure. She's beside herself."
"Where?" he asked.
"Commission holding room," she said. "She asked for you."
He almost said no. Students must learn to carry consequences without their teacher's coat. Then he imagined the chalk heart being rubbed off and the period drawn and the ten minutes without tweaks. He went.
The room was small, respectful. Hoshi sat, elbows on knees, eyes fixed on a spot of clean floor. The heat had left her face. Anger had taken its chair and then abandoned it. Shame remained, polite.
"I failed your rule," she said before he spoke.
"You failed a moment," he said. "Rules are for remembering moments, not absolving them."
"I overcorrected," she said. "I didn't want to be the girl who can't stop helping, so I helped harder."
He nodded. "That's common."
"What do I do now?" she asked, not desperate, just exhausted.
"Own the glass," he said. "Apologize to the vendor. Pay for the pane. Work a morning at her cart. Then do your ten minutes again tomorrow. Then longer."
"And if they make it content?" she asked. "If my mistake becomes your doctrine's failure?"
"Then I'll say it was mine," he said. "And I'll be right."
She looked up sharply. "That's not fair."
"Nothing about teaching is," he said. "We carry blame the way we hope our students carry strangers. With good posture."
She snorted a laugh she hadn't consented to. He took it as permission to sit.
"They'll ask me to give a statement," she said.
"Give two," he said. "One to the vendor. One to your class. Tell them you moved too soon, and you'll move better next time. If the feeds ask for a third, tell them to buy a chair and come to the park on Thursday."
"Is that… PR?" she asked, suspicious.
"That's community," he said.
She rubbed her eyes. "You're a terrible celebrity."
"Practice," he said.
By the time he left, she was making a list with three items: Pay. Work. Pause. The list looked like a life that might work.
He found Imai in the corridor. "Thank you for calling me," he said.
"I wanted to call you earlier," she said. "But I also wanted to see if she'd ask."
"She did," he said. "That's the part that matters."
Kurobane appeared from a conference room with data and boredom. "It'll trend," he said. "We'll say nothing. She'll fix it. People will forget. Then someone else will break a window. We'll do it again."
"Efficient," Renya said.
"Honest," Kurobane replied.
Night found him on the roof. It always did. The city below had decided to forgive itself for another day's worth of errors. He liked that about cities. They repent in motion.
Aizawa joined him, hands in pockets. "Hoshi?" he asked.
"Will be fine," Renya said. "She learned at full speed."
"Those lessons stick," Aizawa said. "The ones we pay for."
Renya looked out at a skyline that had learned to blink unevenly. "The class… I'm afraid I'm teaching them to second-guess."
"You are," Aizawa said. "But not forever. You're teaching them to second-guess until their first guesses get wise."
Renya let the sentence sit between them and become furniture.
"Tomorrow," he said, "I'm going to ask them to pick a small street and become useless there."
Aizawa laughed under his breath. "Public service announcement: we'll be useless in your area between 3 and 4 p.m."
"Exactly," Renya said.
Below them, a single window reflected the moon as if it had practiced all day for this job. Somewhere, an apology took the long way home and still arrived. Somewhere else, a choice finally stopped apologizing and became a habit.
Kai would sleep and wake and catch something else before it hit the ground. Hoshi would pay and work and pause and then tweak again, less like a god and more like a neighbor. The city would argue, forget, remember, repeat.
Renya exhaled. Teaching felt like holding a door in a wind you did not cause. You didn't get credit for the people who walked through, and you shouldn't. You got to say after you and mean it.
He leaned on the railing and let the night be ordinary. Tomorrow they would make more mistakes, public and private. Tomorrow the class would practice hesitating and hurrying in the right proportions for exactly five minutes at a time. Tomorrow the Commission would ask for rubrics and get chairs.
For now, he allowed himself the smallest pride: not in being followed, but in being argued with, replicated incorrectly, corrected by the same hands that misread him. That meant the lessons had left him and gone where they belonged.
He closed his eyes. The world continued without his supervision, which had been the point all along.