He's been averaging three hours of sleep a night for the better part of two months. His students are disasters. His coffee consumption has reached frankly concerning levels. His brain is so fried that he once tried to grade papers with a protein bar.

So when he wakes up on a Tuesday morning with a vague impression of sitting next to someone on a train—no face, no voice, just the faint warmth of a presence—he files it under sleep deprivation delusions and moves on.

The second dream comes three nights later. He's in a coffee shop this time—one of those aggressively aesthetic places with exposed brick and plants hanging from the ceiling like a botanical jungle. He hates it on principle. But you're there, sitting across from him at a ridiculously small table, and you're saying something—

It doesn't work.

The third dream is longer. He's in his apartment—his actual apartment, identical down to the stack of grading on the coffee table and the scratch on the kitchen counter—but something's wrong. The couch has a blanket that isn't his. There's a second mug in the sink. And you're standing in his kitchen, wearing his old hoodie, rummaging through his cabinets like you belong there.

He is not going to think about it.

He is absolutely going to think about it.

By the time the fourth dream hits—you two sitting on a roof somewhere, city lights blurring below, your shoulder warm against his—Aizawa has started to learn your face. The curve of your smile. The way your nose scrunches when you laugh at his dry jokes. The color of your hair, your eyes, the particular way you look at him like he's something worth looking at.

He wakes up and immediately reaches for his phone, thumb hovering over the search bar.

He doesn't search. Because that would be insane.

But he is this close.

Somewhere, in his own apartment, the radiator hums. There's no one in his kitchen. No one in his bed. No one waiting for him to wake up. Aizawa wonders, in the hollow space between heartbeats, if it would be worse to find out you're real—or to find out you're not.