Chapter Text
It’s cold, was the first thing Shouta noticed. So he said it.
“It’s cold.”
“Yes, and?” Hizashi said back, because he did theater all throughout high school, and it's his built-in response whenever he’s not really listening. Shouta could hear a pop song leaking out from his headphones, likely one of the hundreds to come if the algorithm was working its magic and no one pulled him out of that rabbit hole soon.
“And… I’m hungry.”
“Okay, little match girl, wanna do something about it?”
The nickname sent him reeling and he engaged in a series of unsightly movements to get from hanging upside-down on his sofa to standing up, taking a good look around the room.
It was fine, he guessed, he never really had a problem with it before. The floorboards didn’t creak that much, the windows weren’t so dirty that you couldn’t tell the difference between night and day- not that he ever really opened the blinds, he had blinds-, and his heater did work, he just never felt like using it. It was a perfectly fine apartment for a single man with no marriage prospects and a very limited supply of clothing, albeit a little barren, but for a family man?
“Should I move?”
That got Hizashi to free up an ear. “What?”
“The recession hasn’t hit yet, this might be my last chance,” He explained, but judging by his friend’s face it was subpar.
“But the floors don’t creak that much.”
“I know.”
“And your heater works”
“I know.”
“And I thought that’s all you wanted, a clean living space and a working HVAC system was literally all you sent to your realtor when you were house hunting. Turn it on, by the way, maybe you’ll feel better.”
He will do no such thing.
“That was all I wanted,” He didn’t care much for marble countertops and antique door knobs, still doesn’t, though that’s not the problem here. “but I don’t think that’s good enough anymore. I mean, I’m a father now.”
Hizashi dragged the headphones down to his neck, shutting his laptop so he could bring even a modicum of seriousness into this conversation, as if Shouta wasn’t dead serious already. It was an odd look on him. Was this the same guy who slid around his perfect floorboards in socks yesterday trying to mimic another movie scene?
“You’re not a father Shouta, you don’t have kids. You just picked trash up off the street.”
Right on cue, Trash comes out from under the sofa. She loops between Shouta’s legs, nudges the coffee table so the graded papers he needs for tomorrow morning go flying, walks directly on top of Hizashi’s computer, and sneezes on his jacket before coming full circle and retreating under the furniture again. Their gaze lingers on the destruction in her wake.
“Same thing,” The eraser hero says finally.
“Not at all the same thing and why did you name her Trash?”
“I found her in the trash eating trash and she smelled like trash.” Duh, is left unsaid.
“Real fathers wouldn’t name their child something like that,” His friend sighs, and there’s really nothing he can say to that. Hizashi keeps talking while he holds his jacket as far away from his body as possible and heads for the kitchen, his words turning to shouts over the sound of the sink running, “I’m surprised it took you this long to get one, actually. Why now? Why not as soon as you got your own place?”
“They’re supposed to live a long time, like over a decade. Not the best kind of pet to keep in an infrequent living situation.” He remembers the first time he asked for one, ten years old and still believing There’s Always Room at the Table. He’s almost grateful for the sting on his cheek. “Plus, I was told they were crazy expensive to take care of.”
“And they’re not?”
“No, they are.” Trash is the reason he switched from curtains to blinds and has more wet food in his cabinets than human food in his fridge. He also can’t leave NyQuil open at night and Adderall, to wake him up from the NyQuil, open in the morning. Letting her near them would be like slowly killing her, so that makes two of them. “I need scratch posts and automatic food dispensers and litter robots, not to mention the DIY playground I have to nail to my fucking wall this weekend.”
He hears the sink cut off and Hizashi saunters back in, his leather jacket gone. “That’s why you stopped by the depot? Don’t tell Nemuri, she thinks she’s finally got someone else into woodworking.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Shouta huffs and falls back on the cushion. If he runs his finger along the cloth he can feel the centimeter-deep claw marks. “Nothing’s getting nailed to the wall so long as I’m still renting this place.”
“So buy it,” His friend says, because right after Yes, and? that was his most used saying. It’s why his flat’s got three lamps shaped like three different breeds of reptiles and an alarm clock that sets off disco lights. “Start a mortgage and then buy your robots and wooden gymnasiums, it’s not like you don’t have the money for it.”
Shouta blanches, “What gave you that idea?”
“You have two full-time jobs and receive two different sources of income but you’re still cold and hungry all the time because you never turn your heater on and you live off cheap coffee and grass jelly. When the big crunch-“
“Big freeze.”
“-big rip-“
“The bounce.”
“-When the world ends, it’ll be just you and the cockroaches, cause you already live like one. You’ve been saving since like, what, high school graduation?” Before that, too. “And you’ve barely spent a dime. You’ve gotta have some degree of usable excess by now, just use some of that if you’re such a devoted caretaker.”
And that’s where the misconception is, because he doesn’t. Have excess, that is. He’s not swimming in wealth but he’s not struggling either, he’s got just enough. Just enough to live like a cockroach or whatever Hizashi chooses to call it and then peacefully retire after faking his death ten… five months down the line, depending on how this semester plays out.
He doesn’t even live that sparingly, either. Sure the walls are empty and if he stuck his arms out and did a full rotation in the bathroom he’d end up with snapped elbows, but that’s because every ounce of luxury is compressed into his bed. Individually steel-wrapped micro coils in his mattress, 600-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, Dutch memory foam pillows with mulberry silk cases- He’s got priorities and he knows his shit, don’t test him.
So sure, he could make another shift and put his paychecks towards Trash’s future, but there’s no way that’s a sustainable long-term solution.
“Not good enough,” Shouta says instead, “I should just make more money, pack our things and settle down in a neighborhood with good schools.”
“It’s a cat.”
“Should I get a third job?”
“Okay,” Hizashi says, “you’re not even pretending to listen to me. Don’t get a third job, Shouta.”
“Then what about a harder one? Like those recon missions in the rainforest that the commission pays triple for.” That’s what he said, but part of him realizes that if the commission offers you more money it means they’re positive you’re never gonna get it. He shrugs off the suggestion as quickly as he made it, moving on before Hizashi gets the chance to call it out for him. “Or, no, what about debts.”
“Debts?”
“Yeah, there’s gotta be someone who owes me money out there. You alone rack up like 3000 yen.”
“Buying us take-out!” Hizashi squawks, he wildly gesticulates at the mess of plastic bags and paper cartons splayed out across the table between them. “We’re literally eating that 3000 yen right now!”
“Forest for the trees.”
“Maybe don’t point the gun at your friends just yet?” Shouta clicks his tongue. “Besides, debts aren’t just about giving and returning money, maybe they just owe you in general. Ever do somebody a huge favor?”
“Unlikely.”
“Get hit by their bike?”
“I’m the one hitting the bike.”
“Just keep thinking from a legal perspective, lawsuits and wills and whatnot. That’ll get you somewhere.”
Hizashi said it with such confidence he was almost inclined to believe him, but anything having to do with inheritance was a long shot. His friends might leave him something, but if they die then Bluetooth shit scoopers will be the least of his concerns. And he’d be too guilt-ridden to sell any diamond-bedazzled blazers that His Purple Highness might bestow upon him. There’s Nezu as an option, too, but at most what he’ll get is some treasure map that he’ll probably die before cracking. All that leaves are any of his parents, and they’re a complete no-go-
Shouta paused, straightening back up again.
“What about child support?”
“For the last time, you’re not a dad and Trash is not your kid. No judge is gonna be convinced that some poor bystander you’ve grabbed off the street is the mother.”
“No, god. Not for Trash, for me.” Hizashi didn’t even grace that with a response, but he was too wrapped up in his mind to notice. “31 years and I never got a check. I may be an adult now but that doesn’t mean debt just expires, right? They’ve still gotta pay it back. If anything, it’s grown with interest. A few phone calls and I could send them to jail.”
His friend drummed his fingers against the laptop, the crease deepening between his eyebrows. “But you’re a foster kid, Shouta, you were emancipated a long time ago.”
“I know what you’re getting at,” He says honestly, pinching his bottom lip between his nails and glaring hard at the carpet, “but think about it. That’s just the case in other parts of the world. Here, even if a kid’s put into the system their birth parents still have a final say over what happens to them-“ It’s why officers shove crying children back into the arms of whatever adult’s got a leash on them. It’s why he ended up in a group home when others got sent to some private institution. “- and they can come back any time they want. Whether they knew it or not, they were in charge.”
“And they’ve got an overdue obligation.” He heard Hizashi huff, a little disbelieving that he’d taken it this far. “Jesus, you’re gonna find them?” Shouta nodded, he could feel the corners of his mouth itching.
“Pull them out of hiding. Say they’re middle class-ish by now, or lower middle back then, whatever, that’s at least 30k yen a month. 12 months and we’re at 360k. 360k for 18 years is… six? Six million something. And that’s before the last decade and a half of interest. I could move out, start a mortgage, and send Trash to private daycare with that kind of money, Zashi. I could cripple them.”
It was radio silence on said man’s end, and looking up he was met with Hizashi staring right back at him, furrowed eyebrows so deep it looked like it would leave a mark.
“You’re pretty excited about this,” Hizashi said bluntly, expression unchanging. “Are you sure it’s about the money?”
Shouta felt his own eyebrows raise, the hard focus his gaze was set in disappearing with a blink, albeit still a little twinkly at the prospect of money-grubbing.
“Why else?”
Hizashi smiled.
“Fair enough. But still,” His friend glared even harder at the floor than he had, “try to get you to find your birth parents for sixteen years, Trash does it in one day. Unbelievable.”
Izuku doesn’t do half-hearted.
Even before the months of training that All Might had him do, hard work was his thing. His habits consisted of eating the same meal for days in a row until he perfected the recipe and turning in projects so well done that he made everyone else’s look like shit. His mom wouldn’t let him puff up pillows in his room for fear it would lead to a deep clean.
Had the trash on Takoba Beach been fifty pounds lighter he wouldn’t have even needed to be asked.
And so when he and his tweezers stick the last piece of pink sequins into place on his tri-fold board, rearing back to take in the finished piece, the only words that come to mind are bitch, you wish.
Needless to say, this was a wildly unhelpful thought to have in the middle of their project expo.
“I can’t believe you brought that with you,” Uraraka says to his left, brown eyes staring daggers into the tweezers he stole from his mom’s nail kit.
“I know.”
“This should’ve been finished last night!”
“I know! I know,” Izuku groans, losing his nerve more and more the longer he stared at the jarring color scheme he chose. “But it just wasn’t ready, you know? Like I get these gut feelings sometimes of when more can be done, and the one time I didn’t listen to it I could feel the single point off my transcript haunting me like an eldritch ghost. It’s why the one grade my teachers could never screw with were my summative assessments.”
This gets another ‘Izuku made a mildly concerning statement about his past’ look from Uraraka, but she’s learned by now not to ask, lest he seamlessly changes the topic into the progress she’s made on decorating her dorm like she said she was gonna do months ago. It’s an equally as controversial topic. So she turns away, sparing one final withering glare at the tweezers she blames his downfall on before taking on Tsuyu as her new source of entertainment.
And he’s glad, he didn’t wanna hear any of the advice they were offering last night on call and he doesn’t wanna hear it now. Because he loves his friends, but they don’t get it, not fully, and that made it all the more grating when she was so blatantly right.
The project’s layout is fine, it’s perfect, and it was perfect 12 hours ago. He just kept pushing on, abusing the whiteout and utilizing six different viewpoints around his room of the same damn board, so he could ignore the real, actual problem: the content. It just wasn’t enough.
The project was simple, no matter how you look at it; conduct a few interviews with your relatives on whatever the hell you want to make a family tree- just write the answers in English. And that's fine and dandy and all but he’s an only child, and he’s gonna stay an only child because dad’s long gone, any info about his parents gone with him. Same with his other pair of grandparents, too, because they cut his mom off long before he was born with the excuse that they couldn’t accept her marriage to a man they knew was gonna run off. A bit of a red flag, in hindsight, which makes it obvious why she doesn’t like talking about it. Suffice to say, it’s really just him and his mom against the world.
He’d told Mic-sensei just that, explained all the logistical struggles he would have completing this project, if not toned down to the depths of hell so he could avoid another ‘Izuku just said another severely concerning statement about his home life’ look. And in his teacher’s defense, he did suggest some non-family-friendly alternatives: Ask your friends instead of family, pick out some celebrities and use the answers they gave for their own interviews, binge an interactive cartoon designed for preschoolers and translate everything they say about whatever their favorite color and ice cream flavor is.
Or, Mic-sensei had said in that horribly gentle voice, it’s okay to just do your mom.
And for a moment he’d really considered it, because all cards on the table they'd seemed like good alternatives, but it was the moment that he called it what it was, an alternative, that he knew he couldn’t do it. He’s not one for half-hearted, and part of that means not taking the easy way out, especially when among a class of 20 he’s the only one forced to be singled out and given a pitiful special treatment like this.
He imagined being a parent, snaking through a maze of the students’ presentations arranged around the room, listening to them speaking about their sisters’ food preferences and their dad’s childhood home, before finally reaching his at the very end of the line. Having to hear him introduce All Might as his replacement dad, Mirko as the aunt he never had, and Dora the Explorer as a distant, distant cousin. It was childish, stupid, and less than all swirling around together in one big tornado. And when the storm cleared and the dust settled it was him getting carpet burn on his hands and knees, glue-stick in one hand and tweezers in the other, too far gone to turn back because he’s Izuku Midoriya and he doesn’t do extensions.
He ended up conducting a much more cohesive interview with his mom, going far beyond just her favorite animal and pizza toppings and into what her thoughts were on the looming threat of quirk singularity. He’d eaten, slept, and showered with his English dictionary and was left with four pages filled to the brim with more info on his mom than he ever needed to know- and it still wasn't enough.
It didn’t look that lacking and empty, but spend more than a minute at his station and the difference becomes glaringly obvious. Even Kacchan had more pages than him, and for as seriously as he takes his grades he’d usually rather eat glass than talk to his annoying ass old hag and weak old man. Izuku knows he’d have never done Mic-sensei’s celebrity or fictional character suggestion, never with a gun to his head, but if he had, if he had listened, standing here with the measly fruits of his labor might feel just a little less awful.
But he hadn’t listened. Instead, he’d gone half crazy and toed the line between doing nothing and doing way too much, and now he’s left here with an eyesore tri-fold board and a gaping hole of everything he knows he could've done differently, everything he knows he could've done period.
Though the longer he stares at it the weirder it gets. He watches the gaping hole shift, expand, and morph into something resembling a human shadow, and suddenly Aizawa-sensei is behind him, looming over his shoulder like an eldritch ghost. Not because he finds the man scary, since for him at least that effect wore off when he got an A+ on his first pop quiz and grades have long been the way to his heart, but because he’s awake. That alone is uncanny.
Izuku expects the worse for a moment, observing Aizawa-sensei observe his project, which in turn is observing Izuku himself since the massive white space is basically a lens into his soul- Just one mega meta circle of watching. But instead, when his teacher lifts an arm and points at something on his board, he just says,
“It’s a, not an. Parrot begins with a consonant.”
“Oh!”
Izuku drops the tweezers, much to the delight of Uraraka and Iida judging by the synchronized sighs of relief they give, and scrambles for the whiteout. It remains silent for a few more seconds while he works, but eventually, the question eats up his brain matter and he’s forced to succumb to his curiosity.
“Thanks, Aizawa-sensei, and uh…” He tries his hardest to come up with an appropriate alternative to What’s up, teach! The last time Kaminari called him that their legs were sore from suicide laps. “You’re here for the expo?”
His question contains so many undercurrents of why why why tell me why why why I wanna know why why why that it’d be impossible for anyone not to pick up on it.
His teacher nods his head in Mic-sensei’s direction, and while he guesses it’s an answer it’s still just a little bit odd to him. They seem like great friends and all but Mic-sensei alone usually isn’t enough to pull Aizawa-sensei from a mid-day nap. The man should be laying in the sunbeams somewhere, or curled up in a void-of-light storage closet with a broom to the door, no in between.
Izuku attempts to shrug off the weirdness, “That’s nice, the projects really are cooler than they seem.” Though not his.
Aizawa stays where is.
“Everyone put a lot of work into them.” More than him, probably.
Aizawa still doesn’t move.
“Koda interviewed his rabbit,” He tries as a last line of defense, and while admittedly it did get a micro eyebrow raise, nothing else about their situation changes. “…You should definitely check it out.”
His teacher shrugs, “I might, at some point, when the crowd clears.” He glances at the 19 other stations taken up with family members, then glances at Izuku’s decidedly deserted wasteland.
Cold as ice.
“Where’s your mother,” The man more so demands than he does ask, as lightly as a man of his height and color palate can demand, straight to the point. “I’m only asking because Mic’s got protocol for that kind of thing, parents running late.”
“What is it?”
“Public shaming.” Izuku’s eyes grow to the size of saucers. “So you can see why it’d be in your best interest to let me know and avoid that.”
“It’s okay, my mom just can’t come today. She’s got a work thing.” Another micro eyebrow raise.
“I was under the impression Ms. Midoriya was a stay-at-home mother.”
Izuku shook his head, strands of hair almost whipping his eyes from the speed and force. He thinks that if he moves fast enough he can give himself a concussion and forget the distinction his teacher made between Miss and Missus. “She was, but she’s already got her Master’s, and now that I’m living in the dorms she’s trying to back in the legal field. She’s establishing her name right now, that’s why she couldn’t afford to miss meeting her client.” He paused for a second before adding, “I told her to go.”
He’s rambling, but he knows Aizawa doesn’t need some long-winded explanation about his situation. He’s not sure how long the man’s been teaching but there’s no way he hasn’t seen parents running late before, or being a no-show altogether. The only difference between then and now is that at least when one of their family members fails to come through, there’s usually at least one more available to pick up the mantle. Iida’s got his brother, Todoroki’s got his mom, and Izuku’s got… something, probably, hopefully. Just a little out of reach.
What will be in reach though, in anywhere from ten to twenty seconds of awkward silence, is Aizawa-sensei’s pitiful glances and a drawn-out speech about quality over quantity and how It’s In the Love, Not the Blood.
That’s what he expected, at least, but as usual, Aizawa-sensei never ceases to surprise him
“Let me guess, celebrities and cartoon monkeys.”
The boy deflates, “Is that also protocol?”
“No, it’s just Mic trying his best.” His teacher’s eyes scan over the pages he’s glued to the cardboard again, sickly sweet pink bouncing off his irises, “Doesn’t quite hit the mark though, does it.” He blinks and the trance is broken. “But did he also say that it’s fine the way it is? Don’t feel the need to fabricate a family line if you don’t want to, Todoroki does that enough for the both of you.”
Distantly he wonders how many people Todoroki’s shared his theories with for it to reach even the teacher’s lounge. Then, when realizing All Might himself is in said teacher’s lounge, he decides to stop wondering. Izuku blows air out of his mouth, suddenly feeling like a petulant child.
“Yeah, he did, and I know.”
“Then what’s the problem here? Cause you were giving yourself carpal tunnel with those tweezers earlier.”
He gestures lamely to his left, where there exists a lineup of his friends and their own stations. His friends who’ve got more pages than him and didn’t purposely change the line spacing from 2 to 2.2 and the font size from 12 to 12.5.
Aizawa hums suddenly, like it’s all clicking for him, like he really does get it, and it makes Izuku scared of what sad angle of all this he might’ve implied.
“But seriously, I don’t care.” He hears himself shoot out, opening the gates of hell to the flood of word vomit and empty reassurances, “I’m not, like, crying myself to sleep over it. I just wanted to bulk up my presentation and I figured that’d be easier to do if I had siblings. Or my dad. Or my grandparents. And just because I’m listing them out right now doesn’t mean-“
He’s silenced with a lazy raise of his teacher’s hands.
“I believe you, don’t worry”
“Oh,” Izuku says, a little breathless, “Okay. Good.”
But after another moment, “Is that it, though?”
He cocks his head at Aizawa-sensei’s question, caught off guard, and weirdly enough the man pushes on instead of doing what he usually does and glaring in silence until his students get it. It’s really helped with their quick thinking, but their morale’s in the dirt. He thinks that’s his goal.
“Don’t get me wrong, I know small families exist,” His teacher begins, eyes still trained on his project, “But you don’t think your mother had siblings? Or your father? Or, better yet, your grandparents? The farther back it goes the greater gene pool you end up with, interview one of them the next time you get a project like this.”
Izuku shakes his head again, not faster than the speed of light like last time, just… lost. “But I don’t know where they are. I don’t even know if they exist.”
Aizawa-sensei, for his part, shrugs.
“So find out.”
“Huh,” Izuku says, because it’s all he can manage.
He’s run out of juice and his teacher has, too. Or maybe just 99% of it. Because Aizawa-sensei makes to move on, seemingly satisfied after becoming a tornado of his own and shaking up Izuku’s world before leaving just as abruptly as he came, likely in the direction of Koda and his rabbits, but before he leaves he points at a page one last time.
“Change cosy with an s to cozy with a z, Mic only teaches American spellings and he’ll know the difference. He’ll also prefer it.”
Then he’s gone.
The day passes like that, parents and students alike eventually succumbing to Koda’s rabbits. Izuku included and, at one point, Kacchan, even though he’ll vehemently deny it, maybe cook some rabbit stew to get his point across. But when everyone leaves, really everyone, it’s just him and Mic-sensei left in the room, with Izuku cleaning up his sparkly station and his teacher sliding around in the others’ mess. Eventually, his teacher slides up next to him, and the mega meta circle of watching repeats once again.
“So you decided to zone in on your mom then, huh? Sweet!”
Izuku thinks he nodded, but his gaze was straight ahead and staring into that hole. It’s still there, and it’s gaping. He thinks that maybe, just maybe, there’s something more he can do. Something A+ worthy, full-hearted, so life-alteringly show-stopping that his teacher can’t look away, he’ll burst into flames and the project will be ruined forever, existing only in his legacy.
“You know, as I always say,” Mic-sensei goes on, oblivious to the flame that’s just been lit under him, “It’s in the quality and not the-“
“Mic-sensei?”
“Yeeesss, little listener?”
Light bounces off the pink sequins and catches his eyes.
He can fill it.
“Can I take that extension?”