Chapter Text
Inko and her baby live in a big house on the end of a long winding road on a plot of land far far away from any civilization.
Every morning Inko awakes and does her best that day to be the best mother she can be.
On weekends her husband comes home and she is overjoyed. He leaves on Mondays with kisses and promises he’ll be able to stay forever soon.
Inko knows she has to be patient. She also knows it wasn’t always like this.
She remembers the months before...
She remembers how he stayed out longer and longer.
She remembers the troubled look he’d gain whenever he checked his phone.
She remembers the paranoia. The lengthy background checks into everyone in her life.
Inko knows her husband is involved with something.
She also knows its supposed to come to a climax soon.
and then hopefully a conclusion.
So to be a good mother she has to be patient.
Her son is 9 months old and she loves him more than anything in the world. And he really needs his father. And his father needs him.
So okay, maybe she isn’t that patient. She wants him home and she wants him home now.
Its been two weeks since she’s seen him. They’ve called plenty but its not enough.
She feels crazed. Two weeks alone with a baby. Her baby. Her baby boy she loves so much, but motherhood is so exhausting. She wouldn’t trade it for the world, she just wishes she had someone else to do nighttime diaper shifts with.
It doesn’t help that Inko woke up extremely early that morning to no power throughout the house.
Maybe she should’ve been more cautious when she looked out the window after settling Izuku back into his crib and saw an aurora of electricity off in the distant weaving through the rising sun lit sky.
So maybe she wasn’t thinking very logically when she saw a very worn out looking car driving up their long winding road not even an hour later.
Nor was she thinking that much when she ran out, hopping down the steps of her porch to greet what she thought to be the love of her life.
And she definitely wasn’t when the car’s tires screeched to a halt on their dirt road, and a very big man that she didn’t recognize stepped out.
She probably should’ve been when a blast of pressurized air shot through her stomach.
And she wished she would’ve been when she took her last breaths desperately clawing at the man’s feet to keep him from stepping into her house, her home, and getting to her baby boy.
.
What Midoriya Inko does know is that she is a good mother.
So when she felt herself come to an end.
When she felt her body slowly melt away. and all she saw was the silhouette of a sad looking woman kneeling above her.
She did what any good mother who was thinking logically would.
She pulled.
And that's how Nana Shimura woke up once more.
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“What the fuck” Nana Shimura says when she opens her eyes.
“What the fuck” She says again when she sits up and feels pain. Specifically the stab wound in her stomach and an assault of feelings on all of her senses, pain and senses that she’s feeling.
She’s actually feeling. Ghosts don’t feel. Something is not adding up here.
Instinct makes her reach a steady hand out to her wound, applying pressure to the wound that’s…. Nana pauses when she feels no warmth ooze out of the hole. Not bleeding? This wound that a person definitely shouldn’t be alive from… Is not bleeding… What the fuck.
She looks around and her clothes are definitely.. Covered with blood to say the least. She’s currently sitting in a pool of blood that she presumes is her own. She can smell again and oh boy, she's reeling her head very quickly after her nose is stabbed by the strong whiff of copper. Yeah. so the injury definitely bled at one point at least.
Ripping away the wet blood covered fabric of the ( her? ) jumper, reveals the gaping hole that goes right through her, cutting from the ending of her ribcage to just above her belly button.
What the fuck.. She thinks. That shit looks certifiably fatal and then some. She takes a second to think for a moment longer and the image of a sweet green haired woman, Inko, desperately fighting for her life comes to mind. She was fighting for her life, Nana was watching, unable to help.. Fighting for her life right on the blood muddied soil Nana was sitting on right now.
What the fuck.
The problem is that Nana should not be able to move, definitely not be able to sit up, well the body Nana is in shouldn’t be able to move at least. In truth Nana shouldn’t even be able to feel the slick blood coating her hands right now.
Okay well she really needs to focus, obviously she isn’t dead anymore and the fatal wound that definitely should be bleeding isn’t anymore. And she doesn’t have any apparent organ failures?
Nana rubs her chin with the non-bloodied backside of her hand, only to disturb some dried blood on her that had dripped from her lip.
Okay great, so she doesn’t have any apparent organ failures anymore.
Jesus. Spending almost half a century in an incorporeal ghost form certainly hasn’t done my emergency reaction much good. She thinks as she hoists herself up for the first time in many many years.
Nana feels so heavy, she realizes now, as she stumbles to stand up. The world is suddenly very real and vivid. Wind whisks through her hair and she can smell the dew in the fresh air of the morning, bright sunshine warms her skin and she should be thinking about the crisis at hand. What it will mean for her and Inko. but there in that moment she just takes a deep breath, enjoying the sensation of pushing air through ( mostly intact ) lungs. Here in this moment, Nana is alive.
Also in that moment Midoriya Inko is dead. These two things are related.
So related in fact that when Nana turns around to the house behind her she comes face to face with a bloodied transparent green haired woman who is looking at her with eyes wide and mouth agape, completely stunned, Inko-chan.
Glancing down Nana sees they have matching blood covered jumpers ( or used too, before Nana tore the entirety of the bottom half off of hers ). They also have the same hands, and dirt covered pants, and tufts of green hair, and- okay yeah she gets the point, she’s definitely in Inko’s body.
Inko seems to come to the same conclusion because she immediately breaks into soundless ghost sobs and attempts to bury her head in her hands-only for her hands to pass through her head and stick out the back like a twister game gone horribly wrong. Inko screams, pulling her hands out as fast as humanly ( ghostly? ) possible.
Its completely soundless, of course, seeing as though Ghosts can’t really make noise. Nana almost would laugh at the ludicrousness of the situation if she hadn’t done the same exact thing when she first looked at her own dead body.
And her body wasn’t even possessed by some older ghost she didn’t know.
Hero senses finally boot up again and push away Nana’s own panic, so she’s able to collect herself and give Inko a sad smile. “First time?” She asks, and from Inko’s trembling lip and wide eyes ( now angled at her ) she guesses her joke didn’t land, tough audience.
Inko moves her lips frantically as if to say something through her hysterics, but freezes when no sound is made. Nana takes a few ( shaky ) steps up to her and hovers her hand where Inko’s ghost shoulder is. She knows Inko can’t feel it, but hey, it's the thought that counts right?
“Hey kid, I’m going to need you to listen to my voice. Right now.. Well, right now you’re not solid at all so you’re not gonna be able to feel anything or make any sound,” Inko looks more worried than before, “But that also means you can’t feel any pain, so you’re completely safe. Nothing bad can happen to you.” The “anymore” is left unsaid.
Inko’s lip quivers more as she raises a palm and pokes a finger through it, she looks back up at Nana horrified, Nana starts “I know. Its really fucking crazy and very disorienting too, but I can still see you. You’re still here. You still matter.” Inko softens at that. Of course that doesn’t stop her from letting out another soundless sob, though this one seems to be more out of relief than sheer terror.
A couple seconds pass of silent sobbing as Nana holds a hand over something ( someone ) that’s not really even technically there, before a baby’s wail sounds through the open door of the house and the two mothers’ heads ( how could you consider yourself a mother after what you did. Who you abandoned. ) both shoot up. Two voices, one unable to be heard the other new to being able to be heard, whisper one word in realization and dread: Izuku.
And that’s all it takes for Nana to be off.
Seventeen years of being a hero fire off in her body as she quietly slips up the porch and into the house, she notes that the quaint furnishings haven’t been disturbed, except for the trail of bloody footprints leading up the stairs.
Each movement she makes feels unnatural now that she’s alive again, and Inko’s body definitely is at least 45 kilograms lighter than hers was. It has been seventeen years since she’s fought anyone and-
Nana takes a deep breath and goes to activate her quirk, she imagines gusts of wind flying underneath her and the feeling of weightlessness humming through her body, she can almost taste her feet leaving the ground and she opens her eyes and- nothing happens.
Okay, so she’ll also be fighting quirkless. Hopefully the villain that just murdered an innocent mother without a second thought would suddenly gain some humanity and leave immediately after being politely asked to.
Inko flies by Nana, noticeably wailing now, and straight through the walls up the stairs.
Nana wishes she could say she doesn’t understand what’s going through Inko’s mind right now as she slinks into the kitchen and opens a cupboard to grab a tablecloth and a fire extinguisher- that she might’ve already known was there from her ghost creeping.
Suddenly she’s gliding up the stairs.
She follows the footprints- more like lightly covered red smudges now- into a hallway, and easily locates the room from which they lead into ( and the room Izuku’s crying is loudest in ). She creeps next to the door. She can hear the noise of some sort of metallic tinkering go on. The room’s door is closed.
Which honest to god does not give her very good chances of this working, but it has to, it has to.
So without any thought at all, Nana aims the fire extinguisher at the door and lets loose spraying. A loud hissing of air and powder sounds for a few seconds before Nana releases the trigger and it halts. The tinkering noise has stopped, and is replaced with louder crying from Izuku.
There is a long pregnant pause filled with Izuku’s wails before muffled footsteps start up and move closer.
The door creaks open and the second she sees both of the villain’s hands free ( of any small fragile baby ) she’s spraying the fire extinguisher at his face and kicking in the door.
The man screams in anguish, either from the chemicals in his eyes, lungs, and mouth or the solid four inch hardwood door to the face. He tries to take unsteady desperate strides backwards to get away from the chemical dust, but Nana is already on him.
Her body suddenly takes over, having done this many times before, she swipes her leg through his feet with as much force as the tiny body she’s in can muster. Maybe its the seventeen years of inactivity of being alive, or the drastic size change, but she only manages to get him to stumble a bit.
Shielding his eyes he desperately makes a grab at her, Nana ducks under his arms easily and uses her momentum to clog his face in with the steel metal tube of the extinguisher. A loud crack rings out and he makes a grunt of pain before he drops.
She doesn’t give him time to recover because before he even hits the floor there’s a tablecloth twisted around his neck. Easily Nana stomps her foot into his head and pulls as hard as she can. From the strangled noise he starts to make she thinks he might just pop.
That doesn’t deter her.
His hands instinctively go to his neck desperately trying to pull the cloth away, he kicks his legs trying to get a hard grasp on the ground to stand, but Nana doesn’t let him.
Carefully she had made sure her torso and foot on the ground were steady, that way she could keep her hold on his neck while still being able to stomp his face in.
And that she does.
She thinks by the third boot to the head he’s probably not conscious just by the way his entire body goes loose. But it doesn’t stop her from continuing to viciously stomp. Many many times.
She can’t really justify it at the time because her body is just moving, no thinking is going on. It knows what to do and how to hurt.
Maybe it was the fact she hadn’t felt adrenaline ( or anything ) in over a decade. Maybe it was the fact she watched this man blow through an innocent mother. Maybe it was the fact she wasn’t helpless anymore.
But what Nana does know is the fact that when she’s done, and she relinquishes the choke hold on the man, he’s dead.
Nana looks up dryly, keeping as much of her composure as she could. She had never been part of limelight heroics before. Definitely not like the limelight celebrities they called heroes now.
No. Things back then were more dire, each villain taken down was a fight for life. Each hero marched more like a soldier ( Which they were weren’t they? ) .
What she’s getting at is that she's killed before.
She’s had to.
It doesn’t stop the dread that permeates through her body, the familiar heavy, heavy ball in the center of her core that forms its so heavy it’ll drag her down each time. Each time she tries to fly. Each time she tries to sleep. Each time she looks at her son. And it’ll never. Ever. Leave.
She wiggles her nose, tapping back into reality. Izuku is crying, has been crying, and she can feel a part of her heart that she tried to kill a long time ago longing to go hold him.
So that’s what she does.
Or tries to do until she comes face to face with Inko again.
Inko who was watching.