As much as I love the “Aizawa is Nedzu’s personal student/protege” troupe, I have something so much better; Hizashi is Nedzu’s personal student.

If you haven’t heard of this before, hear me out. If you have, you know the drill, but I came up with a timeline/AU that I think works.

Shortly after the Oboro Incident, Nedzu called all the students in that year’s hero course to his office one by one to check in on them, and then Hizashi walks in. He’s so goddamn peppy and bright, but everything he says is so perfectly calculated that Nedzu almost misses it.

Nedzu sees a child with manipulative tendencies, a showy, child-friendly public persona, eyes that notice far more than they should, and a sense of frustrated rage that underpins everything he does.

For Nedzu, looking at Hizashi is like looking in a mirror.

From there, things spiral. Nedzu asks Hizashi what kind of tea he likes, and Hizashi probably says that he makes his own blend so Nedzu can’t buy it, but he could bring some in and give Nedzu the ingredient list with all the proper ratios and how hot the boiling temperature of the water should be? And Hizashi just so happens to have a free period twice a week, so he can drop by next free period he has? And when he’s there, Nedzu starts telling him about how tea spread across the world in pre-quirk times, and explaining the political factors behind the spread of tea (Britain annexed India and absorbed tea into British culture, America threw their tea away in rebellion when they gained independence but tea slowly seeped back into their culture as a sweetened iced beverage mostly thanks to Japan, etc), and Hizashi says he might drop by again to finish their conversation next time.

A week later, Nedzu is teaching Hizashi about how rebellions start, and how to incite them, and how Japan is in a precarious political position thanks to the HPSC and rising crime rates spurred on by quirkism and how the HPSC is purposefully inflaming quirkism through the kinds of heroes that they choose to support and endorse along with subtle manipulation of the school system so that the HPSC can make people scared of ‘dangerous’ quirks and lean on the HPSC for safety-

Towards the end of the year, Nedzu tells Hizashi that in his third year, Hizashi will officially be his personal student and that he will have his own course designed for him along with… assignments. Hizashi quietly wonders what took him so long.