Work Text:
Inko had been playing this game for years now. She had mastered the art of getting close enough to people to make them feel they knew everything about her, yet giving nothing away. She had close friends who would be able to say her favourite food and would jokingly list everything that had made her cry (which was a feat in itself), but ask what Inko worked with, how her family looked like, and they would find themselves stuttering and unsure.
Inko had seen the relief in the eyes of a long time friend when she casually mentioned that her husband was taking their son to a movie, could taste how the hidden embarrassment rose as they didn’t dare to mention that they hadn’t even known that she had a husband, let alone a son.
Speaking of her son, adopted since three months now and already cemented in her heart, he was currently sitting on the couch, mouth silently moving to his thoughts, rehearsing. The habit of mumbling that she had been anxious would reveal the lies and deceptions that they needed to tell for her missions, had so far been strangely helpful.
His living imagination had helped her in her missions, like wondering out loud if a stranger was lost because they had been following them for a while, or, like being the bridge that found her Hisashi, right when she desperately needed someone to play her husband for the ruse to work. Just as he needed someone to play his partner to calm a noisy younger brother.
Hisashi, her husband-since-a-year that she now had known for about two weeks had gone out the door, brighter smile that she had ever seen on his face to pick up said little brother from the train-station, since “Kazuki has a bit of a bad habit of getting lost.”
(Not staying in one place, Izuku remembered his new dad thinking, but that sort of meant the same thing, didn’t it?)
Inko breathed out, took one last look to make sure that everything supposed to be seen was seen, and everything that was supposed to be hidden was hidden, when the doorbell rang.
Hisashi could not have been back yet.
“Uncle’s here.” Izuku said, and it sounded less like the question that it probably was, another one of his adorable habits that Inko had gotten used to. Sometimes the child was so direct.
“It’s probably just a neighbour,” She said, really hoping it wouldn’t be anything other than that.
Carefully, she opened the door, ready to send whomever was on the other side away when she was immediately greeted by a giant bouquet of flowers, large enough to cover up the face of the person standing right outside, taller than her but not as tall as Hisashi.
”Ms Midoriya!” Said the person, shifting the flower’s away just enough to peek a face forward to the side of it. Unassuming, plain, with a soft smile; but Inko knew not to immediately trust that sort of face. She, after all, used hers to her advantage every day in her work. ”I hope I’m not too early, I’m Hisashi’s brother Kazuki.”
Somehow, Inko managed to get her mouth to move. “He just left to pick you up?”
“Must have missed him then,” He didn’t seem to sad about it, but did not make any movement to force himself inside. “My brother is such a worry-wart at times, it wouldn’t surprise me if…”
The phone interrupted him just as he spoke, and he shook his head with obvious and mild exasperation. “That would be him.”
(Izuku looked at him with the open and genuine awe that only a child could have. Was uncle able to see the future?)
Before Inko could move back Izuku had already jumped down from the couch and stood on his tip-toes to reach the phone, bringing it to his ear. “It’s dad!” Izuku confirmed, calling back at them and humming at the other side of the line. “Your brother’s here, he brought flowers..! You want to talk to him?”
After getting a nod of acceptance from Inko, Kazuki stepped inside and quickly pulled his shoes off, moving the flowers that he still held in his hands to rest in the cradle of his left elbow as he smiled brightly at Izuku, taking the phone from him.
“Hisashi! Oh no, I’m already…” Kazuki looked right at Inko and rolled his eyes like he was looking for sympathy, as a voice cut him off from the other side of the line. Kazuki waited the tirade out before frowning in mock confusion. “What? Where? Now what could have made you think that? I found the address to Ms Midoriya just fine and a friend gave me a ride… Oh, completely different topic, I lost that scarf that you gave me last week. I am so sorry about that. It could be anywhere by now!”
(Izuku’s eyes went somehow, impossibly wider. Tracker? Is uncle really that bad at directions?)
Kazuki mouthed a thank you to Inko as she took the flowers that he had brought before turning his attention back to the phone-call. “Well maybe if you hadn’t hidden my sister-in-law and my nephew from me, then maybe I would tell you some things.”
Inko hid her relief, her shoulders falling down from their tense position from view behind the frankly ridiculous amount of flowers that Kazuki had apparently brought. She would have to split them between two different vases, and getting to work with that helped against calming her nerves about the surprise visit.
At least, the identity was confirmed and it wasn’t some government agent trying to uncover her, was her thoughts, right as she felt something strange attached and hidden in the bow that held the flowers together. As she moved the fabric to look inside, immediately, her body seized.
There was a bug.
"A bug!?” Izuku’s voice rose from the other side of the room, and as both Inko snapped her attention to him and Kazuki turned to look, he quickly continued. “...I found. I found a really big bug earlier today!”
“Really?” Kazuki said in that voice that adults used to encourage children, before speaking into the phone without attention to its recipient, words quick enough to be melded together. “I’m going to have to hang up and hear what my nephew is talking about, see you soon!”
There was some kind of protest, smothered with how Kazuki hung up the phone and immediately sat down on the floor as to not loom over her adopted son. “I’m sorry, Izuku, what were you saying about a bug?”
Still fingers frozen, Inko felt the bug, the wireless recording-device through the fabric of the bow. This kind of technology was new, impossibly so, and immensely expensive. Her organisation had just a few, for Hisashi’s brother to have that kind of resources…
He would have to be from a similar organisation; but Hisashi had said that his little brother worked some boring government office-job, the only strangeness had been the hours that he kept to accommodate for the episodes of bad health that he had… Inko knew from experience how impossible the government was to infiltrate, even the lowest of rungs.
To steal something like this, to get it for fun, was impossible.
It would all make sense, if Akatani Kazuki was part of the secret service.
The very organisation that was hunting her.
As Izuku had grabbed Kazuki and had dragged him away to the couch to show him his drawings; Inko could not be happier that the apparent government agent that she had in her apartment didn’t see the minor breakdown that was only shown in the sharpness of her eyes, as she committed his looks to memory.
She would have to take it up with her handler after she had survived the dinner.
The government didn’t know, not yet, couldn’t have any actual proof. They would have acted already if they did, and if Hisashi didn’t know… his little brother might use this opportunity to try and intimidate her to reveal herself. The early arrival just proved that to be true, trying to shake her facade as a normal house-wife.
Inko took a breath. Her mission was not going to be over this soon. She could not let them take Izuku and put him back into that horrid orphanage she found him in. She could not let them ruin her mission. Not if it would spark yet another civil-war.
Inko smiled and brought one of the vases with flowers along as she joined her son and Kazuki at the table.
He would not be fooling her.
Ms Midoriya Inko was everything that Kazuki had feared she would be.
Kind, gentle, a bit nervous but with a hidden core of steel.
She was, without a doubt, much too good for his brother.
He had felt it the moment he stepped through the door, arrival planned to be able to greet the Midoriya family without his brother hovering in the background. Midoriya Inko did not deserve to have that possessive asshole that liked to call himself his brother as a husband, and the fact that they had somehow been married a year already without Kazuki even knowing that just proved his point; involving a single mother and her adorable child into the shadows of his brother’s life could simply not be ignored.
Hisashi would corrupt her or break her heart or pull her into his wrongdoings.
Even if Kazuki had never been able to actually prove them, he just knew that they were real, they had to be, and he had to figure out what it was and stop it. Hisashi might be good at hiding his dark dealings, but he was absolutely awful at hiding the smug look on his face when Kazuki was unable to find them.
Kazuki had planned to use this time to explore the apartment, try to find evidence and try to pin down his brother and save this woman and her adorable son from whatever corruption Hisashi would bring into their family, but he simply couldn’t leave Izuku while the child was explaining something about a TV-series that he liked (how they got to that topic, Kazuki didn’t remember and didn’t care, the child was as big of a hero-fan as he was!), and Ms Midoriya was the pure personification of hospitality itself as she prepared tea for them both.
The precious five minutes that he had made sure to secure slipped away in a moment as Hisashi appeared in the doorway.
It looked like he had hurried; his normally calm and smug grin was gone and replaced by something that Kazuki had grown up knowing to be the “I am annoyed at you but I won’t show it because it will put me in a bad position so I will smile” face.
Kazuki had perfected bringing that to the surface intentionally by the time he was seven.
It brought him just as much joy to see it now, even hearing it in his brother’s voice was a victory.
“I’m delighted to see you here but I do wish that you would have called before and told me that you were fine finding your way here.”
“Didn’t I? Must have forgotten it.” Kazuki said, barely casting a glance to his brother. “Just as you forgot to tell me about my brilliant nephew and beautiful sister-in-law. What else could you have forgotten to tell me?”
“You’re just too kind.” Inko’s expression looked just a little bit strained as Kazuki finished his sentence and he cursed himself. He couldn’t allow his pettiness and suspicion for his brother affect her.
(Izuku patted Inko’s hand in a matter that was supposed to be comforting, he couldn’t actually tell her what that uncle didn’t mean to threaten her.)
“Has everything been fine?” Hisashi was saying to Inko quietly, leaning over to place a kiss on the side of her cheek in an almost uncharacteristically absent-mindedly way, but as Inko turned her head to his voice he seemed to catch her lips instead.
And both of them froze.
Kazuki narrowed his eyes at the display as Inko’s face got red, and Hisashi was still in a way that Kazuki had not seen him before.
A year of marriage and they acted like newly-weds.
Something boiled over within him and Kazuki slammed both hands into the table in front of him, gaining the attention and dragging them both out from the stunned condition that some simple PDA had put them in.
“Ms Midoriya. I’m going to be frank with you.” His hair hung down over his face as Kazuki bent down in a low bow. “Please break up with my brother, you can do so much better!”
“I’m sorry?” Inko stuttered, blinking multiple times as if to make up for the minute she had been frozen, while Hisashi heaved a sigh of what could have been annoyance and could have been relief.
“Kazuki, would you be so kind and not...”
(While the adults was doing that smiling-but-not-really at each other, Izuku sneakily turned his abandoned drawing upside down, finished drawing the arrows of the situation. Mom thought uncle was after her, uncle wanted Mom to leave Dad, and Dad… just wanted them to all get along? But if Uncle did make Mom and Dad break up, that would mean that Mom’s mission would fail and that would mean…
Izuku furrowed his brow.)
Ms Midoriya seemed frozen at his declaration, and Kazuki felt bad for springing it at her right in front of Hisashi, but she had to know that there was better people out there, he could perhaps introduce her to some of his friends? Anything that would be better than...
There was a sniffle on the side of the couch, right next to him, and all thoughts that were running through his head paused. Izuku choked a small sob and looked straight up at him, eyes almost comically large and filled with tears. Tears that immediately overflowed and started to pour down puffy cheeks when he met Kazuki’s eyes.
“You don’t want to be my uncle.”
Within moments Kazuki had moved, heaved Izuku up on his lap and looked like he was the one about to cry. “Of course I want to be your uncle! You’re my adorable nephew!”
“Kazuki. You cannot be his uncle if I’m not his father.” Hisashi took his chance, earning a glare from his little brother who was holding Izuku like he thought Hisashi would spirit him away.
He didn’t notice how Izuku’s tears had mysteriously stopped the moment that he had picked him up.
“Uncleness is a way of living, brother, not a matter of legality or family.” Kazuki stated, as if it was law. “I’m choosing Izuku to be my nephew.”
“So you’re not going to make Mom leave?” Izuku asked, his voice muffled just enough by Kazuki’s clothes to make it sound like his voice was still breaking.
“Of course not.” Kazuki said, bewildered like his thoughts had not been about making sure that he could hasten a divorce just a second ago. “I will just have to come over a lot more! Make sure that you’re all doing okay. I will bring you lots of toys, and I even have some vintage comics that I think you will love."
(Fuck. Both Inko and Hisashi thought, synchronized, and Izuku reminded himself to ask what that word meant after his uncle had gone home.)
(Later, Izuku “accidentally” pushed over the vase with the bug in it, destroying the device. Inko breathed out a sigh of relief that she wouldn’t have to do it herself, Kazuki could not blame his new nephew and just chastised himself for not bringing presents for him right away, and All for One was simply relieved that this would make his family spend more time together.
And the game continued.)