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She's lying on a mat in the middle of the living room floor when he finds her, face-down and propped up on her elbows. Strands of auburn hair that she hasn't bothered to push back brush the pages of a photo album, and dozens more loose photos are scattered across the floor. She's muttering something to herself, thumbing through pages, and for a few minutes he watches as she reaches for some of the loose pictures, meticulously arranging the ones she likes - or something like that, anyways - in a neat square next to the photo album.
He hasn't touched the dusty satin covers of those albums in years and can't imagine ever wanting to, but he doesn't have the heart to stop her. Besides, the initial shock of seeing those albums, so carefully hidden away in moving box on the top shelf of a closet he'd never imagined she'd find or be able to reach if she did, keeps him frozen in place as much as the knowledge that if he speaks now, he'll regret his words. For whatever reason, she can look at those pictures with wonder and not the kind of grief that chokes him at their mere mention, and he wouldn't begrudge her of that.
"I always thought photo albums were stupid," he starts when he finally has the composure to speak. "Kept saying no one bothered to print out pictures anymore, but your mother just loved 'em."
Asaka nods, but she doesn't look up. It's a moment before she replies; she takes a moment to swap the positions of two of her photos, pursing her lips in concentration, then sits up so she can turn towards her father. "It's for homework."
"Okay." Katsuki doesn't want to dwell on this subject any longer than he must, but he can't help but add, "surprised you found these."
"I had to do it for school," Asaka explains. "For English class. We have to make a family tree.” She holds one photo up to the light, then another, and chooses the first to add to her stack of candids. “With pictures.”
"Oh." He can't muster much more of a response than that, not when his reaction to reminders of that long-gone life is and probably always will be to freeze up. It is the one and only provocation at which he cannot and will not launch a tirade, though he almost wishes he could - anything would be preferable to this silence.
"We don't have a lot of pictures around, so I had to go looking. Found these in a closet." Asaka turns again, tilting her head quizzically - it's so completely Ochako that Katsuki's breath catches in his throat. "Why'd you hide these? There's so many good ones!"
“Didn’t hide ‘em.” Katsuki digs his hands into his pockets. “I guess I never thought you’d want to see them.”
Asaka turns away from him again, though he can still see her bite her lip guiltily from this angle. “Sorry if you didn’t want to see these. I can put them away.”
So perceptive. Asaka’s only eleven but she already reads people with her mother’s insight and ease; of course she’s noticed. “No, ‘s okay. You need to do your homework.”
She looks down at her a stack of photos in her lap, suddenly shy. “I was wondering about some of the pictures, though.”
“Hm?”
“I…wanted to know what some of these pictures were of,” she asks, her face reddening with embarrassment. “But if you don’t want to look at them-“
“No. I’m fine.” He knows his tone is a little too gruff, but it’s hard to manage anything else as he joins his daughter on the floor. “Which ones?”
Asaka still looks abashed when she holds up the first of the photos in her stack. “This one,” she says, her voice small. “What’s going on in this one?”
Katsuki takes the slip of photo paper from her hands, trying not to let it tremble as his hands shake. “Um,” he mutters. He doesn’t even want to look, but he can’t very well answer her questions without seeing the photos. In this one, he and Ochako are dressed in snow gear, sandwiched between one of her parents on either side; he has his left arm around her and his right arm around a pair of skis he’s trying to keep from falling (it had been so icy that day, he remembered), and she’s leaning against him, letting her father hold her snowboard so she can wrap both of her arms around him. He’s scowling – idiot, he thinks, almost disgusted that he’d ever managed a look so disgruntled at a moment so much closer to perfect than almost anything since. “That was a ski trip in Nagano. Must’ve been right after we got married. That ski resort gave her a lifetime pass after she dug some people out of an avalanche up there, and that was the first year she got to use it.”
“You look so grumpy,” Asaka observes. “Why do you look like you don’t wanna be there? Was it cold or something?”
“It’s a ski resort, Asaka. Of course I was cold.”
I could ask myself the same question.
“Hm.” If she has an opinion, she doesn’t choose to share it. Instead, she offers him another photo. “This one?”
He’s sitting on the back of a bike while a much younger Ochako, one hand on the handlebars and the other holding up her phone, grins into the camera. He’d said it was ridiculous to print a selfie, but then-eighteen-year-old Ochako had loved that picture and he hadn’t had the heart to comment when he’d found it lying around in her seemingly-endless stacks of photos.
His throat burns. He can remember that day but not the occasion, and it’s almost unthinkable now – that there once were moments mundane enough that their context could be lost, that her presence and her smile and her touch had been so routine that days had run together. Perhaps he’s seeing through rose-colored glasses now, but he feels as if a heavy weight is pressing down on his chest at the thought of ever having taken her for granted so thoughtlessly.
“I can’t remember,” he admits, and the photo begins to tremble in his hands in spite of his best efforts to stop it. “I don’t…I think it was just a regular date. Nothing unusual. Nothing…special. Just…normal.” I wish I’d known. I wish I could beat my younger self over the head until he got it through that stupid skull of his that there was no such thing as normal, not with her.
Asaka senses that she’s hit a sore spot – she always knows, and she always cares, and in that and in so many other things she’s so much like her mother that it smarts – and gently plucks the photo from her father’s trembling hands. “I wasn’t gonna use that one anyway,” she informs him, handing him another. “This is one of the ones I was thinking about using, ‘cause we have to write about our aunts and uncles too.”
Never mind that both of her parents are only children, apparently.
“All of them?” Katsuki is glad of the reprieve – she’s handed him Class 1-A’s group graduation photo, which conveniently features her parents only in a background role, and he wouldn’t be one bit surprised if she’d chosen that photo to give him on purpose because of it – but he arches a skeptical eyebrow at the idea of its inclusion in his daughter’s family tree project. “That’s…a lot of people. Not to mention you’ve never met half of them.”
Asaka looks offended at that. “I do too know them all!” she insists, jabbing a finger at the photo. “That’s Kaminari-san and Auntie Yaomomo and-“
“You know what, point taken,” Katsuki huffs, shaking his head at the picture. “But wouldn’t you save a lot of space if you used a picture with less than twenty people in it?”
“But I don’t want to leave anyone out!”
“Asaka, when was the last time you saw Ojiro? Hagakure? Mineta?” he shakes his head. Sometimes he can’t quite understand her particular brand of magnanimity.
“The class reunion. You brought me ‘cause all of my usual babysitters were gonna be there anyway.” She sniffs as if she’s just put him in his place. “That was only four years ago.”
“Okay, but-“
“But it would take a lot of space to write all of their names,” Asaka reasons. “So maybe…just the ones I see a lot? Ooh! I have one!”
“If this is anything embarrassing-“
“Here!” she fishes another photo out of her stack and holds it up for her father to see. “This is a great one of Uncle Eijiro!”
Katsuki examines the picture with one of his characteristically longsuffering sighs, because it is exactly as bad as one might expect. In the background, he’s fast asleep, sprawled out on one of the couches in UA’s common room. Ochako’s curled up on against him, probably so she won’t fall off of the tiny sofa, and she’s awake enough to smile at the camera which some unknown party is using to take the picture; in its foreground, Kirishima squats in front of the couch, making some sort of hand symbols of indeterminate meaning (knowing Kirishima, they probably mean nothing and were only supposed to ‘look cool’) and grinning like he’s already planning some dastardly act of bribery.
“No,” he says shortly.
“But it’s so funny!”
“No it’s not.”
“Yes it is.”
“Kirishima would never let me hear the end of it.”
“How would he even find out?”
“My daughter is a relentless pot-stirrer,” he huffs, although it’s difficult to be too upset about it when this is perhaps the one and only area in which she bears any resemblance to her father.
Asaka giggles. “But it’s such a good picture!”
“It’s really not.”
“Fine, then what about…” Asaka opens a photo album to a page she’d saved, using another photo as a bookmark, and holds it up for him to see. “This?”
“Hm.” Her next selection is another graduation photo, this one significantly pared-down. He stands between Kirishima and Ochako, who’s got her other arm around Deku, while Tsu stands at the front of the group and Todoroki and Iida lurk at the edges of the frame, stiff if clearly pleased with themselves. Though these – save Kirishima – were always Ochako’s friends more than they were his, he can’t really deny that they’ve earned the right to inclusion in Asaka’s project. They’d been the ones to step up when he’d been left with an infant daughter and a hole in his heart, and Asaka adores them fiercely – even Iida, who used to make her cry at least once a month with his uncontrolled volume, and Todoroki, who was, at first, as terrified of children as Katsuki had been. But mostly, he knows that his Ochako would’ve loved to see their daughter grow up with this noisy crowd of aunts and uncles to whom she neither bore nor needed any blood relation.
“I mean, they’re not technically relatives, but that one’s better.”
“Mmhm. But I still need one of you and mom.” She looks up from the photo album expectantly. “Do you have one you like?”
“Me?”
“Um…yes?”
He tries to swallow the lump in his throat. “I think you should be the one to, um. Decide.”
She flips through the remainder of her candids, and he gets only a brief glimpse at each – a wedding photo with both sets of their parents; another of Ochako’s selfies, this one on a beach; a canid from a class reunion shortly before her birth. She’s chosen one he’d taken, Ochako by the kitchen window holding Asaka when she was about a month old, and another of himself, sleeping on the couch with one leg falling over the edge and the other flung over the armrest and Asaka nestled against his chest. There’s a picture from the engagement photoshoot that Ochako had insisted upon, two from their honeymoon in Bali, one that they’d asked a passerby to take of the two of them leaning against the railing of a suspension bridge somewhere he can no longer remember. That old tightness in his chest returns, and he finds it a little hard to breathe, knowing in the way that he always knows his daughter why she’s chosen these.
There’s love and warmth and safety in every one of these pictures, things he’s tried with everything that is in him to give her even though he knows he’s coming up short. In every one of these pictures they are happy and – hard as Katsuki had tried to conceal it for the cameras at the time – deeply in love, and though Asaka’s always known that that was once true, she’s never seen it. He takes the photo in which he’s holding her and examines it as if looking for answers, some proof that this could’ve been avoided, but finds none.
He’d had every intention of giving his daughter the life she now knows only in pictures, but perhaps he – who’d never really known how to let his heart soften before Ochako – couldn’t have done it. He loves her, knows she loves him too, but if he is honest with himself, any hope he may once have held for a life like the one with which Asaka’s photos show her to be so infatuated were dashed before she was even old enough to remember having held them.
Katsuki had never meant to do this without Ochako; he’d known that when he begged her not to accept that distress call when their daughter was still so young, and perhaps she had, too, when she’d kissed him soundly and insisted she’d be back by dinnertime. And in every picture she’s pulled from their collection – every moment too intimate to be shared with a class, every captured instant of time he’d do anything to rewind – he sees a longing she’s held in silence all her life. And it’s no wonder that she should. He’s done all he can, but he cannot be two parents at once, and – working as he does – sometimes he feels as if he can hardly even be one. And sometimes, when it seems that she becomes more like the mother she never knew every day, he feels the inadequacy of what little he’s been able to provide for her even more deeply.
Katsuki Bakugou has made a grand total of six apologies in his life, but he’s never felt more compelled to offer up a lifetime supply when he sees the way Asaka studies her parents’ wedding photos.
“Whichever you want,” he says hoarsely when she begins to look at him instead of the photos.
She averts her eyes. “Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t like looking at pictures of Mom, do you?”
“It’s fine.”
Asaka crosses her arms with an air of unearned authority. “You really shouldn’t always say you’re fine when you aren’t.”
“You sound exactly like your mother,” he replies, trying not to let on just how many unnecessary feelings he has about that.
“You say that a lot.”
“I do?”
Asaka nods. “That’s how I know you still think about her. ‘Cause you’re always telling me how much I’m like her and stuff.” She pauses for a moment, and her voice is smaller when she starts up again. “And…your hands started shaking when I gave you a picture of her.”
She really does notice everything. There’s a reason he’s repeatedly joked that, even though she’s got her mother’s quirk, he wouldn’t be even slightly surprised if she’d gotten some mutant telepathy-quirk gene, too. “I do. Think about her.”
Asaka leans against his shoulder, and when he raises his arm to tuck her into his side, she buries her face in his shirt. She’s the only person he knows who he’d let get away with that. “You still love ‘er, don’t you.”
He doesn’t respond, even though it would be the easiest yes of his life.
“I’m sorry,” Asaka says mournfully, because she hasn’t gotten the part of him that makes those words so impossible to say. “I shouldn’t have made you look.”
“You did nothing wrong, Asaka,” he says flatly, trying not to let the wobble in his voice come through in any way that she can hear.
He doesn’t realize that she’s started crying until he hears her sniffle, and if he weren’t baffled that a person so young could be so empathetic as to cry because she’d upset her father, he’d be alarmed. He folds her into his arms – that had taken a while to get used to when affection with anyone but Ochako still felt so unnatural, but sometimes it’s all that will soothe her. She’s always been one to cry quietly, sometimes so much so that it takes him several moments to figure out that she’s crying at all, but he can tell from the teardrops seeping through his shirt that she hasn’t stopped yet when she next speaks.
“I look like her, don’t I?” she asks miserably.
“You do.”
“Do you wish that I d-didn’t?”
“Why would I?”
Asaka sniffles. “Sometimes…sometimes I see you look at me, and when you look away, you seem so sad, and…and…I keep thinking it’s ‘cause you can’t look at me without thinking about her and how…how she’s gone and…you wish I didn’t look like her.” She briefly pulls away to wipe her eyes on her sleeve.
“…no,” Katsuki says after a moment of shock keeps him speechless. He hardly knows what to say in the face of such weighty words from a girl far too young to have been asked to carry such burden. “Asaka, I…having you to remind me of her is…is good.”
Asaka sniffles. “Even though it hurts?”
“It doesn’t.” It does, but not for the reason Asaka thinks. “Missing her, maybe. But…you? Why would I ever be upset that some part of her is still alive?”
Asaka lifts her face and surveys the scattered photos, no longer arranged in their neat square. She reaches for one – it’s one of the few she’s in and her mother, propped up against the pillows of a hospital bed, presents her to her father with an exhausted smile – and studies it, frantically brushing away a few stray teardrops that spatter onto the glossy paper.
“Okay,” she finally says, and perhaps it is.
If not, perhaps it will be.