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It had taken an embarrassingly long time to notice that he had a shadow.
Aizawa Shouta was not a man of great ego, but he did take pride in his hard-earned skills. One of those skills was situational awareness. It took a lot of effort and skill on the part of those around him to go unnoticed. Even Nezu struggled to sneak around Shouta at times, and he had the advantage of fitting in the UA vents.
So it was a surprise and a concern when it took two full weeks and Officer Sansa of all people pointing it out for Shouta to finally notice that he was being followed.
His shadow was small. Painfully so. A soft crunch of debris in the alleyways behind him. A beam of light from a nearby window that took just half a second too long to reach him. A ripple in the midnight breeze that shouldn't have hit Shouta the way it did. The shadow never made their presence obviously known, never outstayed their welcome. Never strayed.
Until they did.
Reports began to creep into the local precinct of a small, lithe figure that swooped in from the shadows and rescued those that needed it. All the witnesses said the same thing - that their saviour was quick and efficient and tiny. No one gave more identifiers than that. Shouta suspected that they wouldn't, rather than couldn't.
Then came the day that Shouta actually saw his shadow for the first time.
He had been patrolling in the early hours of the morning. Nothing unusual. A sound had caught his attention and Shouta had confidently - stupidly - swung right into the middle of a drug deal in the process of going to shit. It had taken mere seconds for the dealer to panic and swipe at Shouta, knocking him into the wall of the alley and knocking the breath out of him. The buyer had screeched and fled with the produce. The dealer hadn't liked that.
"You fucking cost me a whole bag, you fuck!" The man had roared. Shouta, still gasping for breath, hadn't been able to protect himself from the first punch. Nor the second. He had closed his eyes, ready to take the third brutal hit, but it never came.
Instead Shouta had heard a soft curse from above, followed by the distinct crunch of something heavy falling on something breakable. The dealer guy howled in pain and fury, and Shouta's eyes snapped open to see a tiny figure clad in baggy sweats and a hooded jacket bounce from the dealer's now-broken shoulder deftly and land on the floor in a neat roll. Untrained but practiced. The figure wasted no time, using the dealer's disorientation against him by kicking out at the guy's knees over and over. After the sixth kick one of his knees made a sickening crunching sound and the man went down cursing. The figure - so small, so tiny - quickly yanked the guy’s arms back and zip tied them before facing Shouta.
"You good?"
The voice was high. Young. Like, preteen young.
Fuck.
"Eraserhead?"
The kid knew him.
Double fuck.
"You..." Shouta gasped out, finally catching his breath. "Are coming to the police station with me. I have questions."
The kid had skittered backwards at that. Offered an apologetic looking shake of the head.
"Sorry, Eraser, not this time!" they had said before disappearing up a fire escape faster than Shouta could have followed, winded as he was. That night had set a pattern. Shouta had gained a shadow that was usually happy to hover out of sight, but was scarily willing to throw hands for someone so tiny.
("Not tiny!" Shadow would squeak, all prepubescent rage and stompy feet. Shouta had made sure to use that word as often as possible.)
It took three quick takedowns from the kid - each time interfering only when Shouta himself was in the shit - for a truce of sorts to be called. Shouta had never been able to get the kid to sit still long enough to get a straight answer until he'd announced that he wasn't going to try to detain him any more. The very next night his shadow had appeared, travel cup of warm coffee offered freely, and chattered away at Shouta for three hours. Three fucking hours! Shouta had crawled in through his bedroom window at four in the morning smelling like fog and grinning wildly, mind whirling with statistics and analysis of his own quirk that had never occurred to him before.
Two weeks later Sansa had officially announced to the precinct that Shouta had a little shadow. Shouta had groaned and ignored questions and slipped catnip in Sansa's tea in revenge.
The name stuck, though.
("What are you doing, Little Shadow?" … "Thank you, Little Shadow." … "Shadow, why are your shoes covered in wet cement?" … "Shadow, get down from there!" … "Of course I care about you, Little Shadow" … "Shadow? You have three seconds. Run." …
'I love you, Little Shadow.')