Chapter Text
Izuku knew the funeral would suck the second his mother contacted him about it.
He’s become familiar with funerals. Attended far too many for his age, really. The aftermath of All for One was a difficult time for everyone, but the never-ending memorials and tributes to the fallen after the country ceased to be a war zone was an exercise in mental fortitude that no one in his generation should have had to bear. He’d prefer it if he went at least a decade without being forced to go anywhere near another one.
But his mother received a call, and he couldn’t leave her to handle this one on her own.
So, he put in for leave. He told his sidekicks there was a death in the family requiring his attention. Put a notice in the group chat that his patrols would need to be taken over for a few days. Slipped out of his agency and dug out a black suit before the media could even catch wind of the great Hero Deku taking a break.
He’d rather avoid this entire event and drink in celebration instead, but his mother needs him. And for her, he’d be willing to do this a thousand times over.
“Wife? Really?”
“Did Amane know?”
“How distasteful to show up, they’re making a mockery of this family…”
He knew this funeral would be the worst one of all long before they got there, so when the whispers began, Izuku didn’t bother listening. He’s heard worse. He knows his mother can hear them, though, so he does what he came here to do. He puts a strong hand on Inko’s arm and guides her forward.
“Go ahead and pay your respects. I’ll be here,” he whispers into her ear. He has to bend down to do so, but the discomfort is always worth it. “Do you want me to walk up with you?”
Inko shakes her head, offering the smallest smile of gratitude before the complicated face of grief clouds her eyes once more. Izuku lets her go with his head held high.
He has no intention of paying respects to Midoriya Hisashi, so he doesn’t bother walking a step closer.
Midoriya Hisashi and his current wife, Midoriya Amane (nee Umino) died on a clear Saturday morning in a traffic accident only six blocks away from their home in the small city of Kasutiron. A car being driven by a teenager taking his father’s company vehicle for a joyride ran a red light and slammed into them at full speed, plowing their car into a pole and killing both passengers.
Izuku feels bad for Umino-san. He does not feel sorry for his father.
He doesn’t say it out loud. That would be a cruel thing, to admit where anyone could hear that he hopes the man’s last moments were agonizing. That he hopes every second of the man’s life was spent looking over his shoulder for karma. Good riddance to trash is the sort of thing one doesn’t admit idly, and even though Hisashi has been persona non grata since Izuku was a child, he knows his mother is grieving the man she loved once upon a time, so he bites his tongue on the words, Good, I hope it was painful. He does as a good son would do instead and stays by his mother’s side.
The call had come from Umino Miori, the mother of his father’s second wife. Izuku sees her taking on the responsibilities of running the service from the moment they appear—she’s a refined woman, standing tall in a black kimono, her graying hair pulled on top of her head in an elegant bun. She had found Inko’s name and contact information in his father’s address book and added them in to the funeral guest roster.
Izuku wonders why the man ever bothered keeping that information, but doesn’t spare much actual investment in the answer. It’s not like he ever called.
It’s obvious no one knew who Inko was until asked directly about her relation to the deceased. So Izuku feels at least a smidgen bad they’ve brought this kind of stress forward. Not enough to apologize for it, not in the least, but enough that he feels sorry for Umino-san trying to maintain herself while the room erupts in frenzied gossip.
Inko pays her respects, bowing to the photos up front, before making her slow retreat.
“Think of the scandal…”
“He walked out on a big-name hero. If this gets out, it’ll ruin us all—”
Izuku leads her by the arm away from the chatter. He glares in the direction of anyone he hears whispering to scare them into silence.
“But what about Hinata?”
“Are you kidding? Taking her would bring it right to our door! We can’t have the child of that kind of person in our house!”
He notices then, one set of eyes that are different than the rest.
There’s a child sitting away from everyone else. She’s in a simple black dress, ruffled a bit from storage, and clutched in her hands is a framed photo of the deceased with herself happily in the middle holding their hands.
She has Izuku’s hair.
His unruly curls, poking in every direction possible even when pulled back into the tightest bun that could be managed with such thick tresses. The color is different, a bright teal that leans a bit heavily on the blue—exactly the same as the woman in the funeral portrait. She clutches the photo against her chest with a white knuckled grip that betrays the careful blankness on her face, freckled skin trembling with the effort to hold still. To stay quiet. To stay unseen.
Her eyes lock with Izuku’s for only a moment, and in them he sees infinite grief.
“To think her father was that kind of person.”
“She’s a smart kid; she’ll be able to survive.”
The whispers become clearer with how each one makes her flinch, and Izuku’s grip on his mother’s arm tightens.
“Are you serious!? What will people say if you throw her to the wolves like that!?”
“What will people say if we take in a child whose parent wronged a top-ranking hero!? We have to think about our family, too. We don’t want to be shunned for that man’s crimes!”
A face not drenched in hostility finds them not long after Inko finishes.
“I’m so sorry!” Umino Miori bows before them much lower than Izuku feels a woman her age should, shoulders hunched in anxious worry. “I had no idea about your relation— I thought you must have been cousins. If I had known…”
“There was no way you could have, ma’am,” Izuku assures her. His mother looks ready to help her up but Izuku waves her off, moving to do it himself. “It’s been twenty years since either of us saw him, and he obviously didn’t tell anyone.”
An understatement. Every face in the room has been some flavor of shocked and scandalized since they arrived.
“No, he didn’t.” Umino-san rises, looking a bit like she’s sucked on a lemon. “If Amane had known, she would have never married the man— She would have clawed his eyes out for the offense.”
“I’m deeply sorry for the trouble we caused by coming,” Inko begins, but Izuku and Umino-san turn on her before she can continue.
“You have every right to say goodbye to him—”
“Midoriya-san, you of all people have full right to be furious with our family—”
“Now hold on. We aren’t mad—” Inko sputters.
“Speak for yourself.”
“Izuku!”
“What? I’m not mad enough to do anything. Just mad that it took twenty years for his little secret shame to finally come out.”
His mother looks mortified at the admission, but Umino-san just sighs.
“Midoriya-san, you’re free to remain here as long as you wish. If anyone gives you trouble, I’ll see to it.” Umino-san is the picture-perfect representation of a proper lady as she bows again, and Izuku can’t help but admire how well this woman is holding herself together. Her daughter is dead and her son-in-law was a lying piece of shit whose dirty laundry is being aired at their joint funeral, but she only manages to exude grace as she says her piece and retreats into the throng of family members, making her rounds.
“Izuku, don’t be rude,” Inko chastises once she’s gone.
“I try not to be,” Izuku replies instead of offering an apology.
The little girl is even farther away from the crowd now.
The whispers had been consistent after he and his mother arrived, but now that Umino-san came and went from speaking to them, they seem frantic.
Something churns in his stomach from it all.
He doesn’t like this.
~
He was right. He’s always right.
The funeral goes as funerals always go. The priest chants his sutra. Donation money is given. Izuku takes the time to burn three sticks of incense for the woman known as Umino Amane, to the astonishment of the little girl clutching the portrait—more than likely, she was an innocent person in this affair and he won’t hold it against her. Not like he does to his father, whom he ignores the entirety of the ceremony to the point of petulance.
He only gives the man’s portrait a passing glance when all is said and done. If anything, it’s to see what he looked like properly, since Izuku had forgotten his face years ago. He forgets again within ten minutes. He doesn’t care much.
The trouble begins once everything is over, and family is called back to the home of the deceased. Izuku and Inko are told this includes them.
“First they barge into Amane’s funeral, and now they come to her home?”
“Grandmother told them to—”
“I don’t care! It’s disrespectful!”
The whispers are no longer whispers. It’s amazing what things people will just say out loud when they feel righteous.
“At this rate, the family name will be ruined by tomorrow with our pictures in the tabloids.”
“I better not get fired because Amane can’t pick a husband correctly.”
“Fired? Think of the kids in school! They’ll call our sons villains for being connected to a man like that!”
The home his father made without them is nice. Pleasant, even. It’s obvious he let his wife do all of it.
It’s a modest two floor home in a residential area, with flowers growing in the windowsill in front of the kitchen. It lacks the high-class decor Izuku is used to seeing in the Bakugou household, decorated instead with plenty of knick-knacks and signs of life of the family inside. There are childish drawings framed on the walls. Family vacation portraits. A muted ocean color scheme seems to dominate the common spaces in abundant blues and greens and grays—which matches the town, since Kasutiron is seated right along the Izu coastline.
The little girl’s freckled face is liberally everywhere, smiling toothy smiles at the camera. Pictures of a chubby baby with a few wispy curls of blue on her head. Of a toddler excitedly holding an action figure up to the camera. A kindergarten photo of a scowling little blue princess, surrounded by her fellow cranky children in oversized flower costumes in a stage play. Izuku is drawn to a particular photo by a shelf, where the girl is holding up a large trophy.
The trophy itself is on the shelf next to it. First Place at the Greater Izu Peninsula Science Fair.
“Her name is Hinata.”
The voice comes from his left, and it belongs to a boy who can’t be much younger than Izuku. A college student, if he had to guess. The boy looks a bit like the girl in the photo—the teal Umino hair is similar between the two of them, though the boy’s tips are a faded white that gives the impression of sea foam.
He doesn’t look at Izuku with disgust or anger, but a scared sort of trepidation.
“She seems like a talented kid,” Izuku replies honestly. The trophy from the science fair takes a place of honor on the shelf, with multitudes of smaller trophies and ribbons joining it. Izuku sees titles for science fairs. Math competitions. Model race cars. Not every one is a first-place prize, but he can’t see a single honorable mention among them, unlike his own childhood, falling into last place in every event he tried before realizing he wasn’t allowed to win.
“She is. She really is.” The boy nods, grief weighing his shoulders down tremendously. “I’m Umino Aoba. Hinata is my cousin. Amane was… She was my favorite aunt.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“And I’m sorry for everything you’ve been hearing today,” Aoba replies without missing a beat. “I don’t… I don’t know why everyone is acting like this— Auntie would have had their heads over this—”
“Death and stress bring out the worst in some people. It happens,” Izuku tells him, remembering some of the absolutely foul things survivors had hissed at him when he was a teenager. He’s well regarded now. But the disdain thrown at him for existing while others hurt isn’t something he’s forgotten. People are at their worst when they’re in pain. “I’m not really offended. It’s not like I know any of them.”
Aoba slumps, and the fight seems to leave him all at once.
“You’re too good, Hero Deku. We don’t deserve you.”
Izuku snorts. “It’s not like I’m on the clock right now.”
“I think that would have set everyone off worse, honestly. Showing up in the suit.”
The thought is comical enough Izuku almost regrets not doing that. Almost.
“About Hinata…” Aoba starts, almost flinching as he speaks.
Izuku sighs. He looks back to the portrait, noting the freckle pattern in the little girl’s skin and how her eyes lean toward sea foam green rather than the bright blue of her hair. Her skin is darker than his. He wonders if it’s natural or if she spends a lot of time outdoors.
“I’m not going to smack talk our father in front of her, if that’s what you’re worried about. Or demand money. I only came here so Mom could say her farewells— She married the guy, so there’s stuff she needs closure on.”
Aoba nods, visibly relieved. “It’s not that I think you would— I just— She’s only eleven. She turns twelve in a few weeks—”
What a horrible time to lose your family. Izuku remembers being twelve. He wouldn’t do it over again.
“—and I can’t do anything to help her! I’m only in college, and I’m broke as hell, and I live in a studio with a discount futon.” Aoba runs a hand through his hair, messing it up wildly but not seeming to care much about doing so. “This whole situation is awful, and I’m just trying to do what I can.”
“It’s good that you are, Umino-san. A kid in her position needs it.” Izuku stops then, realizing something. “Is anyone looking after her?”
“Granny is, for now,” Aoba answers. Then, with a dark look passing over his face, he leans in closer and whispers “That’ll be a topic of discussion today. Granny gave me money to take her out to eat so the adults can talk it over.”
The conversations around him snap into sharper focus at that, and Izuku thinks about the things he’s heard today.
His anger at his father begins to spread to more people, and the bare minimum of politeness he’s been holding on to all day begins to lower itself.
“Aoba!” Umino-san calls from across the room. Beside her, Midoriya Hinata waits.
She isn’t holding the portrait anymore, but the defeated sag of her shoulders is the same. The smiling girl from the family photos seems like a complete stranger with how she folds in on herself at the eyes turning her way. Adults all over the room look at her as if she’s dirty, and those closest inch away.
Like she’s diseased. Unwanted.
Aoba takes off, pulling a small bomber jacket off a hook and helping Hinata into it before leading them toward the front door. She keeps her eyes on the floor as they go, her fingers shaking as she ties the laces to a pair of bright red hi-top shoes at the genkan.
Izuku watches all of this, and the bare minimum of politeness decides it isn’t actually needed today.
There are other children present. Their parents send them to the little backyard, ushering them out while a few aunts and cousins emerge from the kitchen with tea and snacks. The remaining adults all seem to congregate in the living room in clusters—family groups, Izuku can begin picking out, with more than a few of them giving suspicious glances in his direction.
He takes stock of the crowd the same way he does when preparing to fight. None of them could touch him. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat according to his top sidekick, so Izuku files away every detail his eyes can collect. He takes in the ratio of ocean coloring to other to judge how many blood relations are present. How many seem angry. How many seem apathetic. How many seem bored. He judges the finer quality suits to the slightly worn. The amount of makeup used.
He judges how many fall silent automatically when Umino-san clears her throat, and how many must be tapped or shushed to quiet down.
“I know it’s been a long day, but there are matters to discuss as a family,” Umino-san says in a calm voice that nevertheless claims firm control of everyone’s attention. “And we will be discussing them now.”
Many people avert their gazes. Ashamed, Izuku notes. Good.
But not everyone has that sense of self awareness.
“Can we start with why they’re still here?” A distant cousin points at Izuku and Inko from his spot on the very edge of a sofa, where he’s barely fitting on by the seat of his pants.
“They’re here because I invited them. They’re related to Hisashi, so they have a seat at the table, so to speak,” Umino-san replies.
One of the closer aunts (unrelated, given her plain brown hair and yellow eyes) snorts. “Seat at the table— Don’t joke about this! It’s bad enough Amane is gone. Now her husband’s wife is here to bleed us dry of compensation money while we’re grieving!?”
Inko’s lip wobbles, and Izuku smells the ozone in the air that his sidekicks tell him is him getting angry.
“We don’t need a deadbeat’s money,” Izuku snaps.
The tension in the room is immediate and dangerous. Good. It’s good they know how to shut their mouths.
“We came here today because my mother wanted to say goodbye to her husband. We don’t need your money, and we don’t need your judgment. If we wanted anything out of you, we would have hunted him down years ago for the child support payments he never paid, but seeing as how my net worth is bigger than his savings ever could be, it would be worse than a moot point to even bother.” Izuku is known for smiling in the face of adversity, for kindness, and he makes sure he keeps every iota of such a thing out of his voice as he stares the woman down with the same judgment he’s been given all day. The aunt can’t seem to take what she dishes out and tenses up. “So how about focusing on yourself instead of accusing an innocent woman of being as ass backwards as you are?”
“Don’t talk to her that way!” an uncle, presumably her husband, snaps in a moment of bravery.
“I’m returning the favor of how you all have been speaking about my mother since we got here. I should note, we’ve kept to ourselves the entire day.”
Half the room looks away, shoulders hunching a bit. Did they think he wouldn’t notice?
“He’s right,” Umino-san states, drawing the attention back to herself. “Which is another matter wanted to speak about. I am ashamed of how you all have conducted yourselves today. The things I’ve heard fill me with shame and all of you have dishonored the name Umino with your behavior!”
Most of the room flinches, which brings Izuku a bit of joy since Umino-san didn’t really raise her voice at all. Her disappointed frown alone seems to make everyone uncomfortable in their seats.
“Mother—” the uncle starts.
“No! I will not entertain the petty gossip and judgment I’ve been hearing! Especially in regards to poor Hinata!” Umino-san cuts him off and glares at him until he settles back in his seat.
“Oh, finally, someone brought her up…” a relative on the fringes mutters.
“And what’s that supposed to mean!?” another aunt—Izuku assumes her to be Amane’s sister, from the photos on the wall—yells in a fit of anger. Her face is red and puffy from the sheer amount of crying she’s done today, but her expression is one of pure rage. “Hinata-chan is the one who’s suffering the most today!”
“Hinata’s the biggest problem now that we know Hisashi had a scandal attached to his name!” the aunt from before yells back.
“And what exactly do you mean?” Umino-san asks in a voice that promises nothing good will come from the answer.
Izuku isn’t surprised the aunt hesitates before she decides she wants to keep digging herself deeper.
“I mean what I said. The family name will be dragged through the mud now that he’s here! She’s the affair child! Hisashi walked out on a national hero, and when the tabloids find out about this story, they’ll blame Amane for not knowing her husband had another family! They’ll blame Hinata for being born!” The aunt looks at them all searching for support, and the anger in Izuku’s stomach curls when she seems to find some. “And if we took her in, it’d be our family on the chopping block by association. So, there’s no way I can risk it.”
“How dare you?!” Good Aunt, as Izuku names her for being one of the only people with sense in the building, stands up from her seat to glare at the other woman. “After all these years with Hinata-chan, you’d just drop her like that? Like she means nothing to you?”
Bad Aunt straightens her shoulders, shameless. “I must think about my family. And my children. They’re the most important.”
“Akiko’s right—the guilt by association could ruin us.” Her husband, Bad Uncle, decides to join his wife in solidarity. Izuku thinks they deserve each other and hopes they both go bankrupt within the next year.
Of course, this just invites the other cowards to join in.
“Oh, and think about poor Erika…” A woman leaning against the far wall lifts her hand to her mouth, deep in thought.
“What does Erika have to do with any of this!?” Good Aunt throws her hands up.
Wall Woman’s husband stands taller, holding his wife close. “She’s touring in Russia with the opera! If a scandal broke out, it could ruin her career! She worked so hard to get this far! If she’s ruined now, she’ll never recover!”
The discussion goes nowhere. Voices begin joining in, all What abouts and Think ofs that just scream Me Me Me! in an endless echo chamber of selfish delusion, and Izuku’s anger is a pale shadow to that of Umino-san’s trembling form in her chair.
Luckily for everyone, Umino-san cracks first and stands up to remind everyone who is in charge.
“You all shame yourselves!”
The noise drops off so suddenly you would think her Quirk is stealing sound. Some relatives have the mind to remember to be ashamed, while others seem to try to hold their ground without making it obvious. Suddenly, people who were perfectly vocal three seconds ago seem overly interested in the floor.
The silence can only last so long, though, before Bad Uncle opens his mouth once more.
“If you care that much, why don’t you take her?”
“I want to!” Umino-san admits. There’s a sag in her shoulders breaking the image of strength she’s managed to hold all day, and for a moment, Izuku can see the deep well of grief in this woman’s eyes before she reels it back in to tuck it away. “God knows I want to! But my house isn’t fit for her! There are only 10 children in the entire village and the local schools won’t stay open past the decade. She’ll have no academic prospects unless I send her to boarding school, which is the last place that girl needs to be after such a loss…”
Izuku’s eyes can’t help but roam back to the shelf of trophies. Hinata might be happy with her grandmother, but Umino-san is right about the lack of opportunities in the boonies. Taking a girl like that and leaving her with a dead-end school with no kids in it would be as good as not sending her to school at all.
Izuku remembers being twelve. He remembers how lonely it was.
He thinks the loneliness would break her worse than anything.
“Yuzuki, you seem all fired up. You take her,” one of the cousins off to the side, who had gotten especially loud about how his teaching college would rescind his placement in the class over the scandal, pipes up with a condescending sort of twist to his voice.
Yuzuki is apparently Good Aunt, who looks absolutely heartbroken.
“I can’t. The twins are only six months old and they both have colic— It’s been a nightmare just trying to feed ourselves every day; we can’t look after Hinata-chan properly like this.” A tear slips out of one eye and she’s quick to wipe it away, frustrated. “We won’t have the space, anyway. We only live in a two-bedroom apartment…”
Izuku feels sympathy, for that. Yuzuki obviously wants what’s best for Hinata—Izuku sees it in how she glares at the worst offenders of the day, in the way she clenches her fists around her used tissues, how she trembles with the effort of keeping herself contained—but throwing a grieving child into a too-small household with two infants and stressed-out parents won’t help anyone.
It’s a horrible situation all around.
For every person who loves this child and wants to help her, they simply aren’t in a good place to do so. A cruel little happenstance of fate that places a little girl at the worst kind of crossroads.
“There’s a place she could go,” Bad Uncle says, in the silence that follows. Everyone looks toward him, expectant, and Izuku feels ice crawl up his spine.
He spent his entire childhood enduring the cruelty of others, and he knows exactly how a man like that thinks.
“Childcare facilities these days aren’t so bad,” Bad Uncle offers to the crowd, framing it like a generous offer. One of compassion. Of compromise.
Not at all like a solution that would allow them to legally abandon a child and wipe her from the family registry.
“Are you insane!? Think of the shame of leaving her there to rot! What will the neighbors think?” An older aunt settled on the sidelines fluffs up like an angry chicken at the suggestion.
As if their reputation is more important than the cruelty being casually tossed around.
“I would think the bigger scandal in this room is how you've been talking about a little girl who just lost her parents while you're standing in her house. Have some class.”
Everyone’s eyes snap to Izuku the second he opens his mouth, with the flash of anger tacked onto it fading when the fury baked into his scowl hits them full force.
“You don’t get to claim the high ground over our family’s affairs!” Bad Aunt pipes up. Izuku sees her type a lot. The I’m not scared of you kinds of people who think they can bravado their way out of trouble.
Bravado is never enough, and when the ozone taints the air with his steadily building anger, she seems to second guess herself.
“You’re right. I don’t. But it’s also not hard to when you’re handling all this like screaming children,” Izuku hisses. He can feel his mother holding on to his arm to keep him in place, and it is purely thanks to the reminder she’s there with him that he doesn’t stalk across the room to loom over the woman. “Unlike you, we're not here to stir trouble and point fingers. This is a funeral gathering. Maybe you should take some notes on how to act at one.”
He knows he hit a nerve. He knows because he did it on purpose, just to watch the way self-righteousness and arrogance in spades build up inside her, and she opens her mouth to fire some kind of rebuttal before Umino-san takes the reins of the room once more.
“This is going nowhere,” Umino-san declares. “Hinata needs a home to go to. We will not be surrendering my granddaughter to a childcare facility and that is final.”
“Well, we’re not taking her.” Bad Uncle crosses his arms.
“Aoba won’t be happy about that,” a timid looking cousin next to the kitchen mutters.
“Aoba should remember who’s paying his college tuition—no is no. I say we leave her in a nice facility; she’s smart enough to get by, and when she’s of age, she’ll be able to do what she likes,” Bad Uncle says. Izuku feels sorrier for Aoba than he already did, if this sack of shit is his father. No wonder he stays with a discount futon instead of commuting to school from home.
“Absolutely not,” Umino-san orders before looking out to the assembled crowd. “Anyone? Hinata needs a home to go to. Mine will be a last resort, and goodness knows she’ll be alone if we use it.”
The quiet is deafening.
Izuku can see Yuzuki chewing it over, debating how she could make it work. She can’t. He knows she can’t. Two screaming babies in a two-bedroom apartment with two overworked adults and one grieving child—the stress would compound. Form into worse problems. Become unmanageable. No matter how much they love her, they wouldn’t be able to give her what she needs during the time she needs it most.
Umino-san is in a similar position. Love in spades—love in tsunami waves, looking at how she fiercely glares down the room. But all the love in the world wouldn’t help the isolation. Being taken away to the countryside where the communities are small and insular and no one else may be around that could understand her. Where her skills would have no outlet. The trophies on the shelf tell the story of a child with too much ambition to settle for such a place.
Aoba, for all he shares that love, has no resources. Just a busy college schedule and funds that could be ripped away, leaving him adrift if he stuck his hat in the race.
The rest of the room doesn’t care.
Maybe some will claim they do, but Izuku knows better. They don’t. They never will.
There’s a child suffering in their midst but it isn’t their problem. It isn’t their concern. There’s a potential social consequence to holding a hand out to her, so they won’t take it. There’s no consequence at all to washing their hands of the entire situation and claiming it can’t be helped.
He knows this is exactly what they’re thinking because he’s been on the other side of this scenario more times than he can count. He’s watched mothers at the park ignore their children hitting him. He’s watched teachers conveniently turn away when he begged for intervention. He’s watched all manner of self-described good people pretend he wasn’t there at all.
Hinata isn’t him. She isn’t him by a long shot—she seems to have grown up not having any of the problems he did. A completely different childhood for a completely different child.
But he knows exactly what the heartbreak of being abandoned feels like, and he knows it will hurt her just as much.
He remembers being twelve and alone. He remembers how crushing it was. How alienating. How much he’d wanted it all to end, even if it just meant getting scraps from the uncaring universe. He can’t help but imagine that feeling will be so much worse for someone who hasn’t grown up used to it.
The words come easily. The decision not quite as easily, but when Izuku was fourteen, he threw himself into a villain encounter with nothing more than a backpack and pure fear. He’s made bigger choices on worse feelings.
“I’ll take her.”
The quiet in the room is different now, with everyone frozen at his voice.
“What?” Umino-san asks. In a more delicate voice, one of disbelief.
Izuku squares his shoulders and faces her head on. He wants her to know he means it. “I’ll do it.”
One of the fringe relatives, who had been staring at a wall avoiding everyone’s eyes for most of the talk, pushes themselves forward. “Now see here, you can’t just—”
“Two seconds ago, you seemed perfectly fine with leaving her in a facility to rot with the rest of this country’s orphans. Now you want to complain because I want to help her? You either want her away from your family or you don’t,” Izuku snaps.
“Izuku…” His mother reaches out to touch his arm, and he allows her to.
She’s concerned. He knows she is. This isn’t a decision to make lightly, but he can’t leave things as they are.
“I’m an adult. I have a well-paying job. I have a high security home. I have a support network that can help me—Hinata starts middle school soon anyway, right? She’s self-sufficient for daily tasks. By all means, this is the perfect solution for all of you. Especially if you’re just so concerned about scandals; wouldn’t it be better for the tabloids to camp outside my door while you all get to run away like cowards, without admitting you’re involved?” He makes sure to look at some of the biggest mouths of the evening as he goes on, each of them sweating a bit in their seats when he reaches them. “I’m willing to take her. I have the means to do it. If things were fair and just, we would have known each other already, but we don’t, and that’s not great, but do any of you have a better solution or are you just going to keep dodging any responsibility in looking after the child who needs help?”
No one answers. He didn’t expect them to.
“If that’s the case, then from now on this seems like a matter that’s purely between myself and Umino-san. The rest of you can butt out.”
~
The decision doesn’t feel real until Izuku is standing outside, leaning against the dividing wall of the house with his phone in his hand and contemplating who to call. He can hear the distant sound of waves and the cries of gulls. Kasutiron truly is a beautiful beach city. But the white noise does nothing to help him relax as he chews over his options.
He could call Kacchan. Katsuki would know what to say to screw his head on just right, even if it’s buried under eight straight feet of cursing.
He could call Ochako, who would offer sympathy. And also possibly an offer to murder the family inside. Mostly the second one. She’s gotten vicious ever since properly beginning her career, and he loves her for it, but should probably refrain for the sake of her reputation.
He could call Yaoyorozu. Not for any emotional support, but she’s rich. She wouldn’t think twice about buying whatever companies the shitty family members work for and firing them all. That’s just a Tuesday brunch meeting for her.
Above all, Izuku knows he needs to call someone.
Not a friend. He needs to make up his mind on who to call to bury this.
This isn’t a story he wants getting out. Not for his own image—he’s had people making fun of his situation his entire life. His earliest memories as a first grader were of kids asking if it was his fault his father ran away. He remembers the pity from other mothers when they spotted his doing her shopping and hitting all the sales. He’s used to it. It isn’t fair, but he is. But this story can’t spread for the sake of the little girl who is already having the worst time of her life, and doesn’t need the nation judging her for something she ultimately had nothing to do with.
He has two options.
The first is Hawks. Hawks can bury a story at the drop of a hat—the old HPSC was a rotten corpse of an organization, but if credit were to be given to their little Child Soldier Conditioning Program, it’s that the skills Hawks took away from it are eternally helpful.
The problem of course is that Hawks would then spend the next eleven years reminding Izuku every single day of That Time I Did You A Favor. Maybe even longer. Izuku may hit retirement with the former Winged Hero showing up, geriatric and grinning like a loon, and laughing about the time Izuku contacted him to manipulate the press.
The second option is considerably deadlier, but a lot easier.
Izuku’s top sidekick is a legacy hero. A familial one, to be exact. Tào Damian, of the Vietnam Tào hero family, Los Angeles branch. The Tào have earned a Top Ten position in every single country they’ve sent a branch to, with heroes stationed in thirteen countries so far. Izuku likes his sidekick. He’s the most brutally efficient office politician Izuku has ever seen in his life, despite requiring an anxiety medication prescription potent enough to tranquilize an elephant. He’s a strategic genius on the field before he hits his limits and starts crumbling.
He could call Damian right now and the forces of the Tào family could have this entire affair dead and buried with no evidence in less than six hours.
But then he would spend the rest of his life in debt.
There’s never been any proof the Tào are anything but a widespread hero family, but…well, hero communities talk. They talk a lot. They especially talk about their big names.
Izuku may wake up one day twenty years from now with two elderly Tào women at his doorstep demanding his liver in payment for the favor done in his name.
So those are his options. A former bird man who enjoys being annoying on purpose, or the Vietnamese hero mafia.
Izuku presses a contact name and pulls up a video chat.
“What?”
“Hey, Damian, I need a favor.”
Damian looks anything but happy. It’s extremely dark wherever he is, with a very faint glow somewhere in the background illuminating the parts of his face not covered by dark hair in shades of blue. There are prominent exhaustion bags under his visible eye.
“Are you okay?” Izuku asks.
Damian blinks, rubbing at his face. “I’m fine. I’ve been doing night patrols with Tsukuyomi since you took off.”
Izuku winces. He hadn’t known that. “Oh, my god, I’m so sorry! I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Wha—no. I’m using days to play my way through my Souls collection. What did you need?”
Izuku makes a face, but decides not to lecture his top sidekick on giving himself sleep deprivation to play games. Even if he thinks it’s stupid. Damian has never given a bad performance in his work so he’s free to make poor decisions off the clock all he wants.
“A situation came up at the funeral,” Izuku starts. He chews his cheek a bit, trying to find the right words to sum up the situation. “Um. I’m probably gonna be gone for longer than expected. Spread that around the agency. I’m also going to…need your specific help with something.”
“What kind of something?” Damian’s face is the exact kind of wary that spells how well he’s gotten to know his superior in all their time working together. Izuku would be offended if he didn’t know his usual “something” was normally ten times worse than this. The last time he asked for help with “something,” it led to a gang shootout in Tokyo. The wariness has been earned.
Of course, this just makes the situation fully sort of click in Izuku’s head, and suddenly he feels much less confident and articulate than he did when he was pissed off and glaring down a crowd.
“Um. Okay, so there’s a lot that I just found out, so— It’s complicated, but also not that complicated, but also I’m going to have to put in for Family Leave, because this isn’t an issue I can just jump back into work from, and— Oh, man, I also need to look into custody paperwork, I’ve never had to fill that out before—”
The words tumble the way they always do when he works himself up like this. He’s really doing this. There’s a lot of things he hasn’t considered—does he need a lawyer? Are there going to be visits by Children’s Services? Aizawa had a lot of meetings when he took in Eri, but considering the shared relations, will the government just not care?
“Can you translate that into a direct order?” Damian asks. He mercifully just sounds bored instead of angry—which is normal for him. He has perhaps the most patience out of all the sidekicks for Izuku’s tendencies. The most understanding, too, since he knows exactly how to work around them.
“Sorry! Um—I’m going to be taking custody of a kid. I need this situation buried. Deep.”
Damian blinks. He moves his hair out of his other eye and Izuku can tell he’s examining every inch of his face through the terrible picture quality of the phone camera.
“…did an ex dump a baby on you?” he asks in sheer disbelief.
“What?! No!” Izuku almost drops the phone. He knows his face has gone red and he sputters for a moment before righting himself. “She’s my sister—my dad remarried. He and his wife both died, so I have a sister. She’s almost twelve. I’m… I’m going to be the one looking after her now.”
The blink returns, but the scrutinizing contemplation vanishes and now Damian is back to looking bored.
“Oh. That’s easy then. Give me, like, a day.”
Now Izuku is the one blinking. “That’s it?”
“Yeah. I can make some calls. Relax.” Damian shrugs. Izuku has always wondered why he’s so flippant at the worst things, but Damian did go to hero school in Los Angeles. Cities like that are built different.
“Thank you. Thank you so much.” Izuku slumps a bit in relief, letting his head fall back against the stone wall behind him. “What’s your price?”
“I want a week off. Not now, not when we’re all covering for you, but when you’re back.”
Undoubtedly to play more games. Izuku isn’t actually sure if his sidekick has a social life outside of work.
But, again: not his business.
“Done. I’ll throw in a bottle of that plum wine you like.”
“Top shelf,” Damian demands.
“Yes, Damian, top shelf,” Izuku agrees, knowing he wouldn’t accept anything less.
“Pleasure doing business, sir.” Damian gives a mocking salute before hanging up, and Izuku lets his hand fall to hang limply at his side.
He’s really doing this.
He stays there a while just absorbing that. He focuses on the distant blue of the ocean, glittering not terribly far off in the sliver between two houses across the street. He’s doing this. He has a lot of things to do.
He’ll need to contact lawyers. He wouldn’t put it past some of the people in that house to try and snatch her inheritance now that he’s taking her; he’ll also need to make sure her family’s assets are properly looked after. He’ll need to arrange filing custody paperwork. He needs her school and medical records. He’ll need to change her doctors, too; he knows the hospital he uses is primarily for heroes and victims of villain attacks, but plenty of heroes use its services for their families for privacy reasons, so maybe that transition won’t be difficult—
“Izuku?”
—did she already test into a middle school? Or is she going to have to transfer? If she was just moving up to the local school, then that should be easy. They have time before April, but if she had her sights set on a specific private school, things could get dicey. He should ask Umino-san—
“Izuku!”
“Wha—?” Izuku’s head snaps to the side to find his mother watching him. Her face looks far less devastated than it did this morning, but the grief remains. There’s a tissue sticking out of her purse that seems soaking wet.
“You look lost, sweetie,” his mother tells him.
“Sorry. Just. Just thinking,” Izuku answers. He tucks his phone into his pocket so he can focus on her.
He still has calls to make. He needs to contact Management and tell them he’ll be gone longer, and to tell them to contact the legal department so he can get the lawyers ready, but—but his mom is here. He came here for her first.
“…Izuku. About what you did in there—” Inko begins.
“Mom—”
“I’m not saying it was wrong.” Inko holds a hand up to stop him. “What they were doing to that little girl was cruel. I’m glad you didn’t stand for it.”
He knows that much. She couldn’t have any opinion on the matter during the arguments, as the ex-wife. Or just the old wife. One mystery for the ages will be how his father managed to remarry without formally filing for divorce. Either way, it left his mother without a leg to stand on during the argument in the house, so her feelings on the matter had to be kept to herself. Of course, she’d approve of him saying what she couldn’t.
And yet, she has more to say, so he lets her go.
“But, sweetie— You can’t just jump in and make those kinds of promises. This isn’t a person you’re saving from an accident or a villain. This is a commitment. Do you even understand what you’re signing yourself up for?”
Izuku sighs.
“If she was a little kid, I’d agree with you. It’d be stupid and impulsive and I’d need someone to knock sense back into me, because I know I can’t drop everything and look after one of those.” He learned that much watching Eri grow up. She’s an amazing kid but the level of work that went into looking after her was immense—it gave him a lot of perspective, watching Aizawa-sensei juggle that on top of his regular workload. “But, Mom—she’s not little. She’s not helpless. She can bathe herself and feed herself and use the train, so…I can be the support she needs in other places.”
Inko frowns at him. “There’s more to raising children than the basic needs, Izuku.”
“I know. I’m just saying… I’m just saying she’s not a baby, so I’m not going to go into this treating her like one.”
He remembers being her age. He remembers how badly he’d wanted someone, anyone to treat him with kindness and meet him on his level.
“I won’t be perfect at it, but you know me. I never quit when I decide to do something.”
His mother’s frown doesn’t leave, but her eyes do turn a bit fond.
“All I’m asking is that you don’t fumble this too badly, Izuku.” She reaches out to pat his arm, smoothing the fabric of his suit. “Don’t mess that little girl up more than this week already has.”
In the distance, two black dots round the corner on the sidewalk. Umino Aoba and Midoriya Hinata make a slow-moving pair, with the elder cousin seeming to be leading the conversation as he holds the younger cousin’s hand.
Izuku watches them, noting how Hinata seems to be giving small answers even as the cloud of misery clings to her like a second skin.
“I don’t plan on it, Mom. I’ll be doing my best.”
He raises his hand to give a small wave as they get closer.
Tentatively, his sister waves back.