Chapter 20: The Hallway and the Threshold
After Gaara and Aizawa departed, a profound silence settled over the principal's office. The tension of the debate had not fully dissipated; it lingered in the air like the aftertaste of bitter tea. Yagi Toshinori sank into a chair, the effort of the confrontation, both emotional and physical, having taken a clear toll on his frail body. He looked older and more tired than he had a few moments ago.
Principal Nezu, ever the calm at the center of any storm, took a slow, deliberate sip of his tea. His small, black eyes were fixed on the door through which his newest, most volatile student had just disappeared.
"That was quite the gamble, All Might," Nezu said, his voice a placid, cheerful hum that belied the gravity of the situation. "You have placed a great deal of your personal credibility—and the reputation of this school—on the hopeful rehabilitation of that boy."
Toshinori let out a long, weary sigh. "Faith is a hero's most essential tool, Principal. Without it, we are just fighting for a world we don't believe can be saved." He looked down at his own skeletal hands, then back towards the door. "Besides… did you see his eyes? He is a boy who has never smiled. The pain and suffering in him… it's a void. If we, as heroes and educators, cannot offer a hand to someone lost in that much darkness, then what is our true purpose?"
"Indeed," Nezu replied, placing his teacup down with a soft click. A strange, calculating glint entered his eyes. "His presence here is not just a chance for his own salvation, All Might. It is a test. A test for our students' capacity for empathy. A test for Aizawa's rigid pragmatism. And a test for the very principles upon which U.A. was founded." He took another sip, his small, furry face a mask of inscrutable intelligence. "It will be… most educational to observe the outcome."
The hallway was a river of light. The massive, floor-to-ceiling windows that lined one side of the corridor flooded the space with the bright, optimistic light of the afternoon sun, illuminating millions of dancing dust motes. Gaara walked a few paces behind Aizawa, his silent footsteps swallowed by the sheer scale of the building.
For Gaara, the experience was profoundly alien. He could hear the muffled, distant sounds of a world he had never been a part of bleeding through the thick classroom doors. From one, the monotonous drone of a history lecture. From another, a sudden, joyous burst of student laughter. Further down, the rhythmic squeaking of shoes on a gymnasium floor. These were the sounds of a normal life, of a childhood he had never had. He was a ghost walking through the land of the living, invisible and out of place.
The silence between him and the bandaged man leading him was a heavy, oppressive thing. It was not the empty silence of his old apartment, nor the tense, observant silence of the villains' bar. This was a silence of judgment. He could feel Aizawa's analytical gaze on him, even without the man turning around. He was being weighed, measured, and undoubtedly, found wanting.
They had almost reached their destination when Aizawa stopped abruptly. The sudden halt in their steady, rhythmic pace was jarring. He stood in the middle of the empty hallway, his back still to Gaara.
"The students you are about to join," Aizawa began, his voice a low, dispassionate monotone, "are currently preparing for the U.A. Sports Festival. It is the single biggest televised event in the country. It is where aspiring heroes prove their worth to the world, and to the agencies that may one day hire them. It begins in four days."
He finally turned, his one visible eye, dark and sharp, pinning Gaara in place. "You have had no formal training. You have no time to acclimate or to integrate with your classmates. But you will participate. There is no choice in the matter. Consider it your entrance exam. A practical test, held on the world's biggest stage, to determine whether you have any right to be here at all."
The weight of the proclamation was immense, an impossible, crushing expectation. But Aizawa wasn't finished. He took a slow step closer, his gaze hardening into something colder, sharper.
"I'll be frank with you," he continued, his voice dropping even lower. "I have trained dozens of hero students. I have fought and apprehended hundreds of villains in my career. But I have never, not once, struck an opponent only to have them break down and start screaming like a terrified child."
The words were not delivered with anger. They were delivered as a statement of fact, a clinical, brutal assessment that struck Gaara harder than any physical blow. It was the truth of his own pathetic, shameful failure, spoken aloud by the man who had caused it.
Aizawa saw the flicker of something—shame, perhaps, or a memory of the horror—in the boy's blank eyes, but he pressed on. "Because of that, my expectations for you are rock bottom. My trust in you is a flat, perfect zero. As far as I am concerned, you are not a student yet. You are a problem. A volatile, unpredictable problem that I am now required, against my better judgment, to manage."
Gaara stood there and absorbed the verbal onslaught, his expression unchanging. He did not flinch. He did not look away. He had expected nothing less. Rejection was the only language the world had ever spoken to him with any consistency. This man's cold, brutal honesty was, in its own way, more familiar and less confusing than All Might's baffling, undeserved kindness. It was a language he understood.
He gave a single, sharp nod of acknowledgement.
Aizawa seemed almost taken aback by the boy's utter lack of reaction. He had expected fear, or anger, or defiance. The quiet, stoic acceptance was, in itself, deeply unsettling. He stared for a moment longer, then turned and resumed walking. "Come on."
They stopped in front of a door. It was massive, far larger than any normal door, with the characters '1-A' painted on it in bold, red letters. It was a literal and metaphorical barrier, the final threshold between his old life and the beginning of this impossible experiment.
Aizawa put his bandaged hand on the door. "Wait here," he commanded, his tone leaving no room for argument. "Do not move from this spot. Do not speak until I tell you to."
He slid the massive door open. A sliver of bright light and the warm, chaotic sound of his students' voices—their laughter, their arguments, their life—spilled into the quiet hallway for a brief instant. Then, Aizawa stepped inside, and the door slid shut with a heavy, final thump, plunging the corridor back into silence.
Gaara was left alone, standing on the threshold. He stared at the cold, impassive surface of the door, listening to the muffled, incomprehensible sounds of the world on the other side. He felt no fear. He felt no hope. There was only a profound, hollow stillness within him. He was a boy with nothing left to defend, and nothing left to lose. He simply waited.