Chapter Text
In this version of events, Todoroki Rei gets out of Dodge before her mental state can deteriorate completely, all four children in tow. What sparks the action: a culmination, building steadily. Little Shouto’s training sessions and Natsu’s bite-lipped silences and the easy way Fuyumi lies, and Rei’s eldest, getting too snappy again and again, landing himself in the burn ward.
And then there is Rei herself, who flinches at shadows and chokes on the smell of burn salve and antiseptic, who can sometimes barely look at her five-year old without flinching, without the superimposition of Enji’s lightning eyes and rumbling disapproval. Sweet little Shouto, not even her eldest, who holds his father’s fire in more ways than one.
Rei needs out: she knows this. She just does not know how. Enji is number two hero. Enji wants the children — Enji wants one child; that is one too many. He is number two hero and even if she managed to leave him where would she go. Where would she get the money and the resources to raise the children? Rei needs out but she has no idea how.
Sometimes you do all that you can and it is enough. Sometimes it is not. This is the reality of abuse: it is not a pretty thing. It is a ragged bird in a gilded cage lined in electric wire, and sometimes the door to that cage needs to be wrenched open from the outside.
This is how it happens, the spark:
One day on the streets, Rei meets an old college friend who looks at her too-thin face and darting eyes and asks very gently, “Rei-chan, are you okay?” And Rei, who has not seen any of her friends in years and years, gets a stress breakdown right there and then.
What happens afterwards goes like this: tissues, to wipe away the tears. A hug. A call from the friend to work saying: “no I won’t be coming today.” And then Rei, herded back to a warm apartment, given tea and open ears, all her filters blown wide open from too much stress and too little sleep and a familiar face, gets the entire story out in bits and pieces.
By the end of it the college friend — whose name is Himari, whom Rei has known since she was eighteen and new from the countryside — has an expression like contemplating murder. There is both social services and a lawyer on speaker-phone.
“You’re staying with me until we sort this out,” Himari says, after the tone dial on both calls. “He’s not in city right now, yes? Bring your kids.”
Rei stares at her.
Himari leans over the table and says, very slowly and very fiercely, “He’s not getting anything more, Rei-chan.”
This is how it happens: Rei goes home, packs bags, ushers the children, wide eyes and confused, into a cab and out to the city center. She calls social services again. She calls her parents. She calls her brothers. When Enji comes back she meets him with deep breaths and divorce papers in shaking hands. There’s a messy custody battle that ends in bitter tears and a lot of shouting on several fronts, interspersed with threats of media exposure and long, long nights of Fuyumi hovering, and then the end result — the end result is that she’s out.
They’re out of Enji’s house.
*
The days after the custody battle are so busy that Rei has exactly no time to think about anything. The move is — easier than expected. Rei’s first thought was to go back to her parent’s place, out in the country, with its rice paddies and cicada-song summers, filtered through a soft sieve of cozy memory, but Endeavor's family, even divorced, is still Endeavor's family in the ways that matter. Rei remembers the kidnapping attempts and has no desire to repeat them. The city has better security, faster police response, more heroes, and a plethora of old friends coming out of the woodwork, so in the end Rei chooses to move into a three-bedroom apartment next to Himari’s on the opposite side of the city.
It is not the best apartment. There’s a faucet that needs a bit of fixing, the wallpaper is tacky, and no one likes the the balcony view leading to a back alley, but it’s a good, safe part of town, with a kindly landlady, and Rei is conscious of her sudden financial position as a single mother. Money, at least, had never been an issue before. Now Rei’s relying on the support of her parents, as well as what child support the government and Enji are paying. She’ll need to get herself a job soon. Rei’s degree in nursing has been collecting dust since her first pregnancy, and it makes her anxious. She shelves these worries for the mean time, although they simmer, quietly, in the background. She has four children and a house to move.
Her friends help her with the furniture. Couch, coffee table, bed. Rei jumps when someone accidentally shatters a glass. All of them do — Touya with his fists clenched, Fuyumi and Natsuo frozen and quiet, Shouto hidden with ice creeping up his cheek. They clean up, carefully. They don’t talk about it.
The children divide the three rooms. Touya gets one for himself. He’s fourteen — he needs it. Natuso and Fuyumi bunk together. Shouto is six and still burrows into her bed at night, so they share. They go shopping for plates and utensils and all the little important everyday things they left behind. Grocery runs with Shouto sitting in the front of the shopping cart.
Things get better.
*
This is Todoroki Touya: fourteen years old and and striving to be as opposite from his father as possible. Between his colouring and his quirk this is often difficult. He does his best regardless: drawls more often than he talks, slouches constantly, wears punk jewelry, and hones his face into a practiced visage of bored apathy. Endeavor barks, never slouches and is extremely passionate about all the wrong things, so Touya does his best to counter. He moves with a deliberate laziness, dresses like the cross between a goth and a delinquent, and talks with the air of someone possibly high, because there’s a mental disconnect there — him, his father, him, his father.
(There has to be a mental disconnect there, in his quiet, uninterested voice and distressed jeans and band T-shirts, or else it is so very difficult for Rei to look at him.)
The first thing Touya does when they move out of his Enji’s house is dye his hair black.
*
A week into the new apartment and they are in the neighbourhood park on a summer morning. There is a book, half-opened, in Fuyumi’s lap, dappled in sunlight and the dark shade of the oak trees. Touya is eating the last of an ice-pop, and on the playground Natsuo is pushing the Shouto on the swings. Higher and higher.
“I don’t think he’s ever been on a swing before,” Fuyumi says.
“The old man’s a shit,” grunts Touya.
The ice pop dribbles over his knuckles. Fuyumi eyes it, reaches over, and re-freezes it. It’s All Might themed, which is to say that Touya was in charge of ice-cream runs, so right now all of their ice-pops and freezies are All-might themed. It’s his own brand of vengeance. Not something that would have happened in their old house, although Fuyumi doubts Father would have checked the freezer anyway.
“Let’s not talk about that,” Fuyumi says, after a moment. She peeks over at mother, who’s sitting with Himari-san and Oguro-san, laughing into her hand. Then Shouto, eyes squeezed shut and laughing with Natsuo. “He’ll get to play all that he wants now.”
“He should,” says Touya, and crunches his ice pop. He inspects the playground scene. “You think Natsu’s gonna teach him the monkey bar flip?”
“Not in mom’s line of sight, no.”
*
No one hears hair or hide or face from Endeavor in a month, and eventually the underlying is he going to show up in the house dissipates. The kids get used to their new neighbourhood, dog Rei whenever she goes out like a trail of four ducklings, and integrate Shouto into their group. Natsuo is the best influence — he’s the closest in age, for one, and he’s loud and brash and genuine and exited, and never really had a younger brother to teach things to, so he’s extremely dedicated. Rei signs the kids up for school and Shouto is going to attend elementary instead of the homeschooling that Endeavor originally planned. All the kids need new uniforms. Touya changes his paperwork so his last name is his mother’s maiden one.
And then they meet the neighbours.
*
“Mom,” says Natsuo. “Mom is that a dead body?”
It is 7:00 p.m. Rei just came back from her lawyer’s office, and there is, in fact, a body in the hallway. It’s face down on the floor, and wearing what looks like a scarf despite it being the middle of summer. Scraggly, messy hair. Dirty jumpsuit, although it’s hard to see with the black fabric. Unmoving.
She hopes it’s not a
dead
body.
“No, honey.” she says, although there’s an uncertain question mark in her voice. Her eldest toes the body. Rei gives him a look.
“Hey, you alive?”
Nothing.
“I think we should call the police,” says Fuyumi. She’s biting her lip nervously, which is how Rei feels right now — off balanced and a little skittish. “Or — maybe he drank too much?”
Rei has three types of law enforcement on speed-dial these days. If it’s just a homeless man, though, which… is not out of the question, any of them would be an overreaction.
For a while they just stand there in indecision, staring at the body. Rei hovers a finger over her phone, until Natsuo begins to wonder about zombies and gets loud enough the landlady exits her apartment from the noise. She is a slight, traditional old lady with her silvery hair snapped back into a clip, and she takes one look at the possible hobo face down in front of Rei’s door, heaves a sigh, and says in a truly put-upon tone, “Aizawa-kun.”
Her scowl is ferocious. She nudges the probably-not-a-hobo in the side with a tabied toe. No response. Bracingly, she mutters, “Heroes.”
“Um,” says Rei.
“Aizawa-kun, if you needed to go to the hospital, please go before you drag yourself home. I am retired from the medical profession.”
“Hospital?” Rei repeats, alarmed.
The landlady, Ueda-san, makes a vague hand gesture. Then she bends, rolls this Aizawa-kun onto his back, and checks him over. “He’s just out cold,” she scowls. “I am going to whack Yamada over the head. Where is he?”
Rei has no idea who this Yamada is, apart from that he seems responsible for this Aizawa’s actions.
Ueda-san is still tsking. “And his apartment’s not even on this floor. Honestly. I’ll call Yamada. In the meantime, though…” She eyes the body. She pinches the bridge of her nose, as if to ward off a incoming headache.
After a moment, she turns, expression apologetic but mouth set.
“Rei-chan, I’m terribly sorry to ask you this, but if you don’t mind…”
This is how the body ends up on Rei’s couch.
*
Aizawa Shouta is twenty-one years old and an underground hero. He also seems to have some sort of sleep disorder, paired with a tendency to overwork, which is why he was collapsed on Rei’s doorstep. He lives two floors above Rei with a roommate, a fellow hero. There is a suspicious stain on his pant leg that Rei is not going to look too closely at.
The children, after fifteen minutes of treating him like some fascinating but venomous woodland creature, eventually cave and start the metaphorical poking. Rei quickly herds them away. She bribes them with chocolate fudge dessert, which captures their attention for the next fifteen minutes, upon which her doorbell rings.
“I believe that would be Yamada,” says Ueda-san, checking her phone.
The first thing the disheveled young man in Rei’s doorway says is, “Heeeeeey, I am so sorry.”
His smile is cheerful and his hair is long and pale, and he chatters in a continuous stream between social niceties, complimenting her furniture, introducing himself in bits in pieces, apologizing again. Upon entering the living room, he blinks and then gives a laugh at the sight of all four of Rei’s children simultaneously attempting to unknot Shouto from where he’s cocooned in Aizawa-san’s scarf. “Oh hey, lemme help you with that.”
Rei’s eldest leans back against the couch arm and drawls, “And you are?”
“Yamada Hizashi,” Yamada-kun says, not missing a beat.
Yamada-kun bears the scrutiny of the children with remarkable ease, untangles Shouta gently, and then bops him on the nose. “This ain’t somethin’ you should be playing ‘round with, yanno?” But he’s smiling as he says it, and adds, like an afterthought, “Although since Eraser’s caused so much trouble with you guys I guess he kinda deserves it.”
He bundles the scarf up. Ueda-san gives him a severe dressing down, which he weathers with a sheepish smile. Rei sets out a cup of tea, still steaming, but Yamada-kun declines. “It’s been a bit of a long night,” he explains. His eyes are very green behind the orange tint of his sunglasses. After another apology to Rei, and he hoists Aizawa-san over one shoulder to leave out the front door.
“You can probably get that one on free babysitting duty,” Ueda-san tells Rei, after. “By that I mean Yamada, not Aizawa.”
*
Rei meets Aizawa again, properly, the next morning, when the doorbell rings and she opens to last night’s unexpected guests. Both Yamada and Aizawa have cleaned up some. Yamada’s hair is up and he’s wearing normal glasses instead of tinted ones, and Aizawa no longer looks… put politely, dead. Still tired, though.
Both of them are carrying pie.
Before Rei can get a word in, Aizawa-kun bows. It is straight and formal and surprisingly graceful, considering. “My apologies for yesterday," he says, sincere and a little raspy, like he’s got the edge of a cold. “I should have better anticipated my state of health.“
“Oh.” says Rei. “It — oh, it wasn’t much trouble.” They’re a couple of young boys, these two. It’s easier to see with Aizawa now that he’s gotten clean clothes and a shave on him. Twenty-one. Rei has a decade on them. When she was twenty-one Rei was —
She pauses.
Don’t
think about Enji.
“It wasn’t much trouble.” Rei repeats. Don’t think about Enji. Too late. She feels skittish, all of a sudden, uncomfortable in her own skin. She bites her lip. “Honestly, I think Ueda-san would have chewed you out enough.”
“So much,“ agrees Yamada. “But Shouta crash landed on your doormat, so, apology pie! We have two flavours. Blueberry?”
“Mom,” comes Natsuo’s holler, followed by the patter of small feet. “The rice is — hey you’re the dead body!”
“What,” says Fuyumi.
Half a heartbeat later and the rest of Rei’s children crowd into the entranceway. Yamada salutes them. “Heya kiddos.”
“Hi,” says Touya, flatly.
They look at one another.
Rei, caught between, can feel her heartbeat pick up. It’s — it’s stupid. But she doesn’t know these people, not well. The unsettlement of it is in her lungs and in her throat. And Touya’s eyes are narrowing. The crease of his mouth, downwards, the slow straightening of his spine. And his hair is black now, and he’s Rei’s eldest son, but his eyes, his eyes are still blue lightning and his expression is so familiar, and for a second all Rei smells is the smoke and her stomach swoops —
Shouto marches right up to Aizawa to say, tone jutting, “I don’t like your scarf.”
Aizawa blinks.
Yamada laughs.
— And Rei, fingers white knuckled, comes back to herself.
Wagging a finger, Yamada crouches down to Shouto’s eye level. “That’s cuz you’re supposed to catch your enemies in them, not yourself.” He spins the pie around, cheeky. “Hey, you like apple or blueberry?”
Rei breathes.
Touya is sullen and frowning but not actively hostile. Natsuo has followed Shouto and is now inspecting the pies with unprecedented interest. Fuyumi, one hand on her older brother’s shoulder, head cocked. Yamada and Aizawa are her neighbours. They’re young heroes. Good people. And Touya knows better.
Rei folds her hands behind her. One over the other. She breathes. Her voice does not shake. “Blueberry, please. Thank you.” She smiles, a little tiredly.
“No probs,” grins Yamada.
And that’s Tuesday.
*
On Friday, Rei meets Midoriya Inko.
Rei meets Inko at her job interview. She’d found the posting online a few days earlier and scheduled the meeting in an almost impulsive streak, before the decision could be second-guessed. There is nothing very impressive about the position, small and secretarial as it is. But the office is close, and Rei only plans on working a day one or two days a week. It feels like a momental step, getting a job. Like proof almost, that she can get back on her own two feet after fourteen years of reliance.
The hiring manager is named Midoriya Inko-san. She is a small, slight woman with dark green hair and wide expressive eyes. Rei meets her at a nearby coffee shop, dressed smartly, stomach a mess of anxiety and anticipation.
It’s been so long since Rei’s done anything like an interview.
“Yukimura Rei-san?” asks Midoriya-san.
“Yes,” says Rei, hurriedly. She feels her face flush. “I mean, it’s nice to meet you, Midoriya-san.”
She realizes she’s still standing. She sits down.
The rest of the interview does not go that much better.
Rei is a surprisingly good speaker under pressure; again, it is a trained thing. The problem, however, is the gaping fourteen years of empty job applications and recommendation letters. She halts, and she fumbles, when the matter comes up, unsure what to say. And then in what feels like the most embarrassing moment of her life, Rei also knocks over Midoriya-san’s coffee.
The cup goes careening. The breath goes out of Rei’s lungs, and she scrambles to catch it. She meets Midoriya-san in the middle and they knock against one another even as the coffee goes spilling. Oh no. Oh no no no. She’s going to be so displeased. He’s going to be so displeased.
Rei stares at the edge of Midoriya-san’s soaked sleeve helplessly while the panic attack builds like a headache. “I am so so sorry—” she starts, just as Midoriya-san’s expression flashes panic and she goes, “My sincerest apologies Yuki—”
Rei pauses. Midoriya-san pauses. They look at one another.
“Oh. Oh no, that was on me,” Rei tries, but Midoriya-san has the same idea, apparently — “I cannot apologize enough. I should have moved it—” And Rei says: “No, there’s no need, it was my fault—” They’re like a stopper-starter engine of profuse apologies between the two of them, pausing and then retrying, Midoriya-san frantically pulling tissues from her bag, Rei frantically trying to wipe the stain from Midoriya-san’s sleeve, somehow managing completely different conversations while being on the same topic and working on the same angle. Eventually though, Rei just pauses. And Midoriya-san pauses. And they look at one another, at the coffee stain between them, at Rei bent over scrubbing the brown from Midoriya-san’s shirt and Midoriya-san bent over with her fistful of napkins, neither of them having thought to contact a waiter.
When Midoriya-san slowly sits down and begins to laugh, Rei does too, shakily.
“Oh, oh that was rather silly of us wasn’t it?” gets out Midoriya-san in between giggles.
Rei’s smile is eighty percent relief. “It was.”
They look at one another. Midoriya-san raises her eyebrows, expression sheepish, and shrugs, and then this time when Rei laughs it’s genuine. They call up a server to help clean up the mess. Rei buys Midoriya-san a new coffee, despite protests, and they restart the interview.
*
She gets the confirmation call at noon the next day. Rei is putting soba on a boil for lunch, the children herded away to the park out back. Fuyumi, sweetheart had looked at the stove dubiously, as if Rei didn’t know what they were doing trying to expel her from the kitchen every meal time.
“Hello,” she says, cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder. Midoriya-san’s cheerful voice rebounds back at her.
“Yukimura-san! Are you well?”
Rei smiles. It’s brief and wispy, but there. It’s been so long since she smiled. “Yes.”
“Great! I’m just here to tell you got the job. There's going to be an orientation, and then some training. Can I have a list of what days you’re free?”
There is one orientation day and three training days. Rei gets out her calendar and schedules it with Midoriya-san over the next two weeks, between therapist appointments and meetings with her lawyer. Afterwards, she puts down the phone, slowly. The breath that comes out of her is like a giddy gust. She puts together the rest of the lunch with quick motions: soba, eel skewers, cold watermelon juice. Touya pokes his head in just as she’s ladling out the soba. He takes pair of chopsticks and a bowl and begins to help.
“Good news?”
“I got the job!” says Rei, and then spins, and then hugs him.
He goes very, very still. He always does.
It’s different, between the two of them, Rei and her eldest. She doesn’t touch him the way she does the others. It’s not right — the hugs confined to a hospital bed, Rei’s touch, winding bandages and salve. But it is — what it is. What it was. Because he looks like Enji. Enji, but with Rei’s thin hands and bird-bone frame and the slope of her eyes, and the dyed black hair that belongs to neither of his parents. He smells of ash and burning and this morning also of sundried grass, and under her he goes so very still, tense as a startled rabbit, before he melts, when Rei doesn’t step back and let him go.
His forehead dips to meet her shoulder. He’s taller than her now.
“Congrats,” he says. His lashes are still red-made. They brush her jaw as he turns. He smiles, and oh, he’s gotten so handsome when he smiles.
A minute later Natsuo comes banging up up the stairs hollering for lunch, and Rei lets him go, and he steps back. The distance between them, once again maintained, two perfuncionary feet.
Rei breathes. They pack the soba.
It’s alright. It’s a start.
*
Shouto is not very happy with her new job accommodations.
“So you’re leaving?” he demands.
They’re stretched out under shade of a cluster of tall trees, all five of them, lunch laid out on a picnic blanket and half eaten. Overhead the sky is blue and clear, full of luminous clouds. The humm of cicadas is a low buzz to Rei’s ears. Shouto, mouth smeared with sticky sauce from the eel, has wedged himself onto Rei’s lap, expression petulant.
“You’re supposed to be congratulating her, lil’ icyhot.” Touya taps Shouto on the nose with his finished skewer. “Not throwing a tantrum.”
Shouto turns betrayed eyes onto him. “But she’s leaving.”
Shouto is not one prone to throwing tantrums, so this is somehow more significant than Rei thought. In retrospect… Rei had in fact made it her mission to glue him to her side, especially within the last year. But Shouto’s starting elementary in three weeks, which means job or not, he still won’t be seeing Rei for seven hours a day, five days a week, starting soon.
As if sensing this knowledge, he clings to her a little harder.
Rei tucks her chin into Shouto’s hair. “It’s not a whole day, Shouto-chan, just a morning. You’re going to be starting first grade soon, and then you’re going to leave me. But only for a bit, and we’ll all be back by afternoon snack.”
“Oh,” says Fuyumi. She chews, thoughtful, on an eel skewer. “So when we’re at school you’ll be on shift? That’s a good plan.”
Shouto looks between them uncertainly. Rei kisses the top of his head. “It’ll be fine, Shouto-chan.”
Despite all reassurances, come orientation day Shouto still tries to smuggle himself to work with Rei through Rei’s canvas bag, as if Rei would not noticed the extra thirty pounds of toddler, and makes pleading faces at her all the way through Touya snagging him by the collar and carting him back to the living room.
“Have a good day mom!” Fuyumi shouts, echoed by Natsuo. “Stay safe!”
*
A family of hornets set up shop in Rei’s stomach on the morning of the orientation, some shivery mix of anxiety but also hopeful excitement. She arrives ten minutes early, whereupon she gets a uniform, a nametag, and then whirls her through the tasks that need to be done. Since it’s a weekday and generally slow, Rei goes over her instructions with care. At lunch, Inko-san finds Rei at her new desk eating her bento with a coffee.
“How are you finding it, Rei-san?”
Midoriya Inko is cheerful and talkative, her speech punctuated with nervous hand gestures, and Rei is content to have her carry with the conversation. They exchange dinner recipes. Rei asks her about local community colleges, touching a bit on her nebulous plans of going back back to school right now limited to brochures and some half-filled applications. “Oh!” says Inko-san. “Yes, yes there’s a good one a half an hour train ride away. What do you want to study, Rei-san?”
Rei, frankly, has no idea.
When she was younger, she’d gone to nursing school. A decade later Rei knows herself well enough that a hospital environment would not be conductive to her mental health. She’s not planning on going back right at the moment either. College is a big commitment, and Rei wants to spend time with her children.
“Well,” Inko-san says, thoughtfully. “you’ll have time to decide then. No need to rush.”
“Yes,” Rei agrees.
*
Rei and Inko’s friendship go like this: they are two single mothers with, for one reason or another, absentee husbands. They do not talk about these absences. Some secrets are too close, too painful, too near to the heart. Instead they talk about clothes, and shoes, and sales in the neighborhood, about the newest television series, about the educational system, about their children. Midoriya Izuku is six years old and hero-tongue tied with stars in his eyes. Rei takes one look at him, dressed in an All Might sweater with the hood flipped up, gap toothed, and says: “Oh, oh he’s the same age as my Shouto!”It is in this way that photos are thus exchanged. Actually, entire phone galleries are thus exchanged. Midoriya Inko peers over at last week’s picnic lunch captured in HD on Rei’s screen, hands clapped together.
Eventually, the fact that Rei’s enrolled her youngest in the same elementary as Inko’s Izuku comes up, and they look at one another — Inko, who knows her Izuku hasn’t quite been making friends since his quirklessness had come up; Rei, who knows her Shouto hasn’t ever made a friend, period — and, individually but simultaneously, decide that play dates are in order.
*
It is three in the afternoon with the smell of a storm in the air when Rei comes back from the last of her job training, and the first thing Touya says, when he opens the door, is, “the dead neighbour’s hanging off the balcony.”
Rei pauses.
“Do you mean… Aizawa-kun?” she hazards. And… hanging off the balcony?
“Yeah,” says Touya, which doesn’t provide any additional information.
Rei takes off her shoes, goes into the living room with trepidation, and then nearly has a heart attack.
Fuyumi, and Natsuo, with Shouto balanced on his shoulders, are clustered around the balcony lip, peering with unabashed interest at what is unmistakably Aizawa-kun, somehow literally hanging off the balcony. Not Rei’s balcony, thank God, but the one directly above hers. She can see his shoulders, the fall of his hair. And is he carrying — a cat?
The question to how Aizawa is hanging from a balcony is answered with a laundry line, which Rei sees when she wades past the children and cranes her neck. Aizawa has folded his legs over it at the knee, like Fuyumi on the monkey-bars when hanging upside down, except with a five story drop instead of half a meter. Rei stares.
How is he still alive. How is the laundry line not broken.
Is that a cat?
“Mom!” cries Shouto, little face beaming.
“Welcome back to madness,” says Fuyumi.
“Is that a cat,” says Rei aloud. She has no idea what her voice must be doing.
Aizawa grunts. “Yukimura-san.” And then —
drops.
Rei’s stomach ricochets up to her throat, hovers there for a heartbeat, and then descends with amazing vertigo as Aizawa twists midair and lands in a solid crouch on her balcony lip. There is indeed a cat wedged between his arm and his elbow.
"Um,” says Rei, very faintly.
“SHOUTA!” The holler is like a vibrating gong. “YA CAUGHT HIM?”
The long silken edge of Yamada-kun’s hair spills over, two balconies above, followed by his face. Rei stares at him. Aizawa begins to calmly, methodically, detach the claws latched onto his T-shirt.
Yamada takes one look at Rei’s face and and his expression shifts to instant exasperation.
“Shouta,” he says, tone long suffering. “Shoooouta. Do I owe them apology brownies? I do, don’t I.”
Aizawa-kun doesn’t even bother to glance up. Yamada makes a face at him, and mouths something that might have been “Shouta you dipshit” before turning back to Rei. “I’m sorry — he likes giving people panic attacks. I should know. It’s a gift. Just, uh… wait here a bit.”
And then Yamada-kun disappears from the balcony edge.
For a while, Rei just blinks.
Until Natsu clambers next to Aizawa-kun, Shouto swaying on his shoulders with the movement. His gaze is zeroed onto the cat with great enrapturement. “Can I pet it? Can I?”
“It’s a she,” says Aizawa-kun.
“Can I pet her?”
Natsuo tiptoes. Shouto clutches at his hair for balance, leaning forward, and seems, too, to be barely restraining the urge to hand out belly rubs.
Aizawa-kun starts. “As long as—”
Ding ding dong.
“—Hizashi.” The sound of Rei’s doorbell passes. Aizawa-kun blows out a breath like a sigh. He sounds impossibly nettled, and Rei shouldn’t judge, but honestly, she thinks that’s more Yamada-kun’s right at the moment.
And it is indeed Yamada-kun at Rei’s door. He’s dressed in a penguin shirt, swishy shorts, and a pair of garishly orange oven mitts which hold a baking sheet packed with brownies. Glasses, this time square and for reading, are tangled in his hair. “Yukimura-san! We have… got to stop meeting like this.”
It would be good for Rei’s heart, yes.
“So I shouldn’t touch the tail?” wonders Natsu, from the living room. And Fuyumi says: “No, no it’s going to scratch you—” which is all Rei hears before she’s skidding back inside.
Thankfully, no one has gotten scratched. Natsuo is looking put out, however, and the cat has migrated to Aizawa-kun’s neck, ears flat against its skull and expression decidedly unhappy. Rei puts a hand on her temple.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Calm.
From her side Yamada-kun murmurs, “Ooooookay,” which Rei probably only hears by virtue of standing right next to him. Then his voices rises, a crescendo, addressing. The attention snaps right to him.
“Give the lil’ lady a bit of room kiddos! I bet you she just had the scare of her life. Do you know what’s better? LOOK. BROWNIES!”
Brownies, as it turns out, are always sufficiently distracting.
This is how Rei’s living room ends up playing host with her neighbours and their incredibly put out cat. Apparently, the cat is the reason why Aizawa was hanging off a balcony via a laundry line, as explained by Yamada-kun.
“The little guy has some balance problems from an accident,” he says, handing out brownies. He’s sitting on a plastic kiddie stool, legs folded awkwardly under him, because Rei only has so many chairs. “We’re fostering it while it recovers, and like, accidentally left the balcony door open like a bunch of id iii — um. Careless people. And cats, yanno, they try to jump on everything. But with the balance problem it didn’t stick the landing. Shouta had go diving after it.“ He laughs, airily. "Lucky downstairs didn’t put their laundry line away.”
“…Ah,” says Rei, in response to this.
She really can’t think of anything else to say. She looks at her iced tea, still full. She looks at her children, clustered around the couch where Aizawa-kun is, all of them with sugar powdered on their mouths and attempting (without much subtlety) to pet the cat trying to chew a hole in Aizawa-kun’s shirt. Even Touya is regarding it with hovering interest. The cat hisses at Shouto when he gets too close to its ears, tailed puffed out.
Yamada-kun looks at her face. “You know, I probably owe you more than one batch of apology brownies,” he says, and then goes to quickly pry the cat away before it can do any lasting harm.
Rei downs her tea.
Eventually the sky outside goes grey with the incoming nimbus clouds, and Yamada and Aizawa leave, with much waving and cheerful goodbyes, to take in their own laundry before the storm can get to it. Rei’s children look despondently at Aizawa’s cat, and possibly the remnants of Yamada’s baking tray.
Rei gathers up the dishes, and then goes to take very deep breaths at the kitchen sink.
This is a good thing. Yamada and AIzawa are perfectly nice, if… uh. Aizawa. Rei hasn’t had neighbours she could actually hold a dinner and a conversation with for a decade, and the presence of reliable heroes are good for the children. It’s just overwhelming. The changes. Work. Aizawa hanging off the balcony. Yamada, a cheerful but miniature hurricane in of himself.
It’s been so long since Rei just… peopled. It drains her, now.
She breathes.
“Do you want help with that?” asks Fuyumi, sneaking up, and Rei remember her smile, the light in her expression at Yamada’s stories, all the nervous wariness in her blown away.
Rei smiles, wispy. “Sure.” She hands Fuyumi a drying cloth. She turns on the tap. Soap suds slide over the ceramic plates. It soothes her, the mechanical motion, the wide round turns of her sponge, and when the counter is sparkling and the dishes done, Rei is calm again.
Steady steps now.
They eat a light dinner, mainly of fruit and some of the soup Rei had left to cool in the fridge, to counteract all the chocolate. The storm arrives afterwards and continues well into the night. It is a drumroll in Rei’s bones that gradually becomes static with exposure. She sits by the window of her room and listens to the patter of the water on the concrete, on the metal pipes, tapping out a staccato tune.
It is 10:00 p.m. exactly. Shouto is curled up at her side, face buried in her stomach. His grip on her shirt leaves creases in her blouse. He has little of the usual small-child fears; but storms — or maybe what they bring — are exemptions.
Rei tucks him close and hums a lullaby until he quiets a little, and then asks: “Mama has a friend at work with a son your age. Would you like to meet him, Shouto-chan?”
“Friend?” asks Shouto, raising his head. His nose is red and his expression somewhere between perplexed and anxious.
“His name’s Midoriya Izuku-kun. I think he would like to meet you very much.”
“…Is he nice?”
Rei brushes the hair away from his brow."Very.”
“Then. Okay.”
Rei smiles. Her baby boy. “Okay,” she repeats. “We’ll go next week, then.”
Thunder rumbles, distantly, and Shouto decides this new possible friend is less imperative than burying his head back into Rei’s stomach. Somewhere next door Fuyumi and Natsuo are arguing over the television remote, the television itself playing what Rei recognizes vaguely to be a cartoon show. Rock music filters in from Touya’s room.
The lightning flashes, blue-sharp.
Rei closes her eyes, lets the night pass.