Chapter Text
Somebody was following them.
Midoriya Inko resisted the urge to check over her shoulder as she gripped her daughter’s hand just a bit tighter. The four year old whined at the grip but didn’t pull away, simply rubbing her eyes with her free hand. Inko regretted waking her up past her bedtime to take her to the doctor’s appointment, especially now that they were in danger.
It was nearly midnight in the red-light district of Japan, and someone was following them .
“Mommy, stop walking so fast,” Izuku mumbled, nearly tripping over her own feet in an effort to keep up with her mother. Inko’s heart was beating faster and faster with every second, but she still forced herself to slow down. She considered picking Izuku up and making a run for it, but from the fleeting glances she’d cast over her shoulder five minutes ago, the man following them was considerably larger than her. Probably some strength enhancement quirk, and although Inko was still as thin and agile as her college days, she knew she couldn’t outrun a man like that, especially with her child in her arms.
“I’m sorry Izuku,” she whispered to her, glancing down at her beautiful face just as they passed under a streetlight. Tears burned in the woman’s eyes, but she refused to let them fall. She couldn’t cry, or Izuku would be frightened. The last thing Inko wanted was for what could be their last moments to be filled with fear. “I’m so, so sorry baby.”
“Why, mommy?” Her beautiful daughter asked, blinking blearily at her through her sleepy haze. She knew that they had gone to a doctor’s appointment about her quirk, since she was the last kid in her preschool class to develop a quirk. Inko had gotten worried about her lack of presenting, so she had broken the law; she’d gone to an illegal testing site to see if Izuku was quirkless or not. They’d been outlawed fifty years ago because of their unorthodox methods, but dammit, she had to know . She had to know if they would be safe or not.
The answer was apparently no.
“Because Mommy was selfish,” she told her daughter. She was aware of the man behind them quickening his footsteps, getting closer and closer to them. Whereas before he’d kept a distance of at least twenty meters, he was now closing in on ten meters. Inko looked around for anything she could use to her advantage, but nothing near them was small enough for her to attract with her quirk. Never before had she hated her quirk as much as she did in that moment. ‘ You’re useless, Inko! You can’t even protect him! This is all your fault for marrying that man!’
“No Mommy,” Izuku said, tugging on her hand. She beamed up at her despite her exhaustion, melting her mother’s terrified heart just a bit. “I forgive you.”
Inko closed her eyes for a moment, sensing the man behind them six meters away. When she opened her eyes again, she let go of Izuku’s hand. “Izuku, when I tell you to, I want you to run and hide wherever you can.” Her voice wavered with fear, but she pasted a smile on her face anyway. “It’s like hide and seek, you see? If I can’t find you, we can get that All Might doll you’ve been wanting.”
That made her baby brighten up immediately, grinning. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” She bit her lower lip to hold back a sob. “I love you so much baby girl.”
The person behind them broke into a run for the last few meters between them, his shadow looming ominously on the poorly lit street between them. Inko shoved her daughter forwards, yelling at her frantically. “Run Izuku! Run and hide and don’t come out until Mommy says so!”
Izuku stumbled a bit, glancing back just as the big man came up behind Inko, wrapping his arms around her in a chokehold. Her eyes widened with fear, her small body freezing in place. Inko reached up to claw at the beefy arm around her throat, using her other hand to point down the street. “R-run!”
Izuku, her sweet, obedient girl, did just that. She turned around and sprinted into the darkness, her All Might pajamas fading out of sight within seconds. Inko’s body sagged in relief, remembering how good her little girl was at hide and seek. The first time they had played, she’d hidden so well that Inko truly panicked and thought she must have gotten outside and been kidnapped or something. She always came home from preschool bragging about how she won there, too. She trusted that she would be able to hide this time, as well.
“Stop struggling, you stupid bitch!” The man behind her growled, raising something shiny and silver up into the air. Inko’s fight-or-flight didn’t give in even at the sight of the large knife. The fight didn’t leave her body until the sixth or seventh time the man stabbed her, cackling like a lunatic the entire time. Her consciousness didn’t leave her until he began dragging her body into a nearby alleyway instead of the middle of the street.
Her last thoughts were that of her young daughter, praying she made it out safely.
Ch 1
Izuku adjusted her backpack on her small shoulders, opening the front door to her foster house quietly so as not to wake its occupants. Her foster mother, Itami Hama, was nice enough to her, but always worked the night shifts at the convenience store down the road, so she slept odd hours. Her foster father, Itami Tomoe, didn’t have to show up at his work until ten o’clock in the morning, and thus tried to always get as much sleep as possible. They were the best foster family Izuku had been stuck with so far, so she wasn’t going to complain about them.
It had been six years since Midoriya Inko was murdered in the red-light district; six years since Izuku was placed in the foster system. She was lucky that, of the three families she’d been placed with, all of them had been within travelling distance of his elementary school. Her first foster family that had taken her when she was four had given her up right after her sixth birthday, after they’d finally had a baby of their own. Izuku didn’t resent them for giving her up, since she knew that blood-family would always come first for most people. The second foster family she’d been with had been… well, she didn’t want to even think about them. She’d been with them until she was nine years old, when the police had taken her and her foster siblings away.
She’d been at this new home for a little over a year. The Itami couple weren’t as loving as her first foster home, but they were nowhere near as bad as her second foster home. They were what Izuku liked to think was a healthy medium; she wouldn’t get attached to them. They supplied her with enough food to help her survive, they gave her a room to sleep in (well, more like a storage closet, but beggars can’t be choosers) and she had a bed. What more could she really need?
She turned away from the front door of her home, starting off down the yard to the sidewalk, where she began his twenty minute walk to school. As she walked, she found herself drawn to the shadows instead of the sunlight. The shadows had always been her preference; there was something calming about wanting to blend in where no one could see her.
( run and don’t come out until mommy says so-)
Izuku made it to school right as the warning bell chimed through the hallways. She practically had to sprint to his classroom to make it on time, just barely sliding the door open to slip inside before the bell’s chime came to a halt. The children already inside of the classroom began to giggle at her antics, whispering what could only be insults to each other while sneaking glances at her. Izuku’s eyes trailed to meet a pair of familiar red ones from across the room, just like they did every morning. No matter what, Izuku always seemed to have this innate sense of where Bakugou Katsuki was.
The two had been best friends, once upon a time. Their mothers had met in college and were best friends up until Inko’s death. After she died, when Izuku went to her first foster home, Katsuki and Izuku drifted apart. Izuku’s experience had drastically changed her personality from the shy, quiet type to the dark, brooding type.
( our investigations show he was after Izuku’s quirk-)
As if Izuku’s personality wasn’t enough, there was also the fact that she was quirkless. Nobody liked quirkless people in society, but especially in Japan. The world liked to give statistics saying that at least twenty-percent of the population were quirkless, but the truth of the matter was that the majority of that number resides in more popular areas, like the United Kingdom and the Americas. In Japan, the quirkless population was more like two percent. Of those two percent, one point-five of that were in the older generations, or had already passed away. Half a percent of Japan’s population were in Izuku’s generation or the generation just above his.
Bottom line being, Izuku had never met another quirkless person.
( do you understand what you have to do, midoriya-chan?)
Whatever. That was fine. Izuku didn’t want to be liked simply because of a quirk, anyway. Everyone in their grade- nay, their entire school - worshipped the ground that Kacchan walked on simply because of his amazingly explosive quirk. That was all fine and dandy for him, but Izuku preferred to be liked because of her personality. She would rather be loved than feared.
She knew what true fear felt like. Why would she ever want to inflict that on someone else?
“You’re late, Midoriya-chan,” the teacher, Tachibana-sensei, clucked from the front of the room. Izuku got her panting under control, turning around to slide the door shut behind her. She bowed quickly to her teacher, keeping her eyes fixed on the floor. Unfortunately, her seat was on the other side of the classroom, only a few seats over and back from Kacchan’s. The walk of shame over to her desk wasn’t a pleasant one.
“I’m sorry, Sensei,” she apologized. “It won’t happen again.”
“Now, let’s not make false promises,” the teacher said with a frown on his face. “Now that your little show is over, who would like to start on today’s reading?”
Glad she was out of the limelight, Izuku relaxed into her seat, puffing out a relieved breath. She liked to put on an uncaring, numb persona, but the reality of the situation was that she hated being scrutinized. It had unpleasant memories after the night her mother had been murdered- shbeen kept in an interrogation room in the Musutafu police department for nearly twenty hours after the police had found her. The entire time, she had the horrid sense of being watched.
It was an underground hero who ended up finding Inko’s body, and subsequently Izuku herself. The hero had been brand new to the trade, but had still handled everything better than the police had, in Izuku’s opinion. He was the one who had found the link between Inko’s murderer and the woman herself.
( do you understand, midoriya-chan?)
Yeah. She understood. How could she ever forget that she was the reason her mother had been murdered?