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The checkups came every year.
Pops knew everything about people’s bodies and how to fix them already, of course. His uncles always came back from their work in the city with lots of bumps and cuts and Pops would wave his hands over them and they were cured, like magic. But he wasn’t a baby doctor, and he and Ryota and their growing army of little cousins needed a specialist to take care of them. So Pops said.
She came once a year and tapped their knees with a little plastic hammer and looked in their throats and gave them lots of shots. This city baby doctor. Sometimes she would have them stand on one foot and then the other, or show her how fast they could run and climb. It was a lot like training with Pops and uncle Chrono, seeing what their bodies and heads could do.
Hiro was only three years old; he didn’t remember much about how things Were before. His world extended to the ridge of trees outside their big house as far out as he could see, and it centered on the traditional sitting room on the top floor where he and Ryota got lessons from Uncle Tengai. Ryota was super smart, he knew all of his letters already.
Hiro knew most of them too, but he didn’t work as hard as him. He felt a little bad about it. Ryota's letters were always a little wonky, but he always did them so fast. The only area where Hiro really fell behind his older cousin was…
“Can you tell me your name, sweetie?” the doctor asked him while he sat on the exam table in Pops’ big office, socked feet hanging off, swinging. This was the part he'd been afraid of.
Hiro looked over at Pops, standing in front of the door, watching him with his lovely sharp eyes that Hiro didn’t have at all. He thought that Pops looked like a cat. Or like the ones he saw in pictures, pets were way too dirty for their family, of course. But they looked a little sleepy but also very focused. He looked back at the doctor, smiling in her crisp white coat. The air was tense. The words just wouldn’t come out.
They never did with grown-ups around. He could open his mouth, he could take a deep breath like he was getting ready to talk, but the muscles in his throat just… wouldn’t. They wouldn’t. Wouldn’t move. Refused.
“What about your favorite color? Is it green? I bet it’s green.” Her voice had an unpleasant edge to it now. Hiro thought it might have to do with the expression on Pop’s face, mostly hidden by his plain white mask, but obviously displeased. His stomach turned. He looked down at his hands.
“How about this. Can you point to… your knees?”
He did, and looked balefully up to her through his bangs. She burst out in a relieved grin. “Oh, good job! How about your daddy? Can you point to him?” He did. Pops stared down.
“Can you show me how old you are on your fingers?” He held out three, and then flicked one up and down, because he was almost three and a half years old.
“Oh, wow, you’re getting so big! I remember when you were just a little peanut. Look at you now, little man! Can you stick out your tongue for me and say ‘ah’ if you can?”
He couldn’t, but he stuck out his tongue anyways and she looked into his throat with a penlight.
“Is there any… physiological reason why he isn’t speaking yet.” Pops asked from behind her.
“Not that I can see. Everything looks okay here, no masses or webs, his lungs sound clear."
"There has to be something to explain this. He's far too old for this to be acceptable behavior if there isn't a physical defect."
"He doesn’t have any problem with receptive language, and he’s doing fine with his schoolwork. Maybe he just isn’t much of a talker. Not all kids are, it's only pathological because he's a little past the age where other kids would be speaking. I can recommend a speech clinic in-”
“That’s not an excuse. Defects need to be diagnosed before they can be fixed, and no child of mine is going to be defective.”
Pops’ voice was calm and even until the last word, where it took a sharp turn into the tone of voice that Hiro had only heard once or twice before, when he was really, really, really angry. He snapped his mouth closed.
“He’s not defective!” Ryota yelled from the chair across from Hiro, where he’d been waiting his turn for his own checkup. “He can talk! He talks like all the time! Just not when you guys can hear!”
The doctor looked back at him. Ryota looked funny in his little green robe, his white hair poking out everywhere when he got angry.
“Honey, I’m sure you can understand what he wants, but being able to understand him isn’t the same thing as him talking. Does he - how does he talk to you?”
“With words.” Ryota shot back sarcastically.
“Ryota.”
“Sorry, Pops.”
“He isn’t just pointing at things and leading you to them, is he? Or writing them? It’s good that he can do that, but we want to make sure that he can use his voice to talk to other-”
“No, he really is talking! Last night he was telling me all about-”
Hiro stiffened. Ryota closed his mouth quickly, eyes flickering to his cousin across the room. Don’t mention the little hero action figure he’d found at the bottom of his cereal box. It came with a little comic book the size of Hiro’s hand, and he’d devoured it. Deku, the symbol of peace! A hero. The sort of thing that their family didn’t associate with. He'd told Ryota about it after he'd finished reading it, and then he'd hidden it under his mattress.
“-about when Father took him to talk to his sensei. It was so cool! He told me all about it. About the, uh, the train that they went on, the big building with all the computers-” He gesticulated broadly.
Pops and the doctor shared a look. She smiled, a little sadly and indulgently. Pops didn’t respond.
“I think he talks enough for both of them, huh,” she tried at a joke. Pops didn’t look away from her. Hiro knew what it felt like to be under his gaze. It looked like he was smiling, with the way his cheeks moved, but his eyes didn’t crinkle like a real smile.
“It sounds like these two young men’ve grown up close. Not many other kids around, am I right?”
“And the babies,” Ryota said, kicking his legs.
“Sometimes with kids that grow up this close and sort of isolated-” she knitted her fingers together- “they develop their own language. Not always spoken language, either. Happens a lot with twins. But since they don’t necessarily have a need to develop their critical social skills, they get atrophied. In this case, that might be a contributing factor to Hiroto’s mutism. He's never had a reason to need to speak since he's got his cousin to speak for him.”
Pops hummed and blinked, long and slow.
“So you’re saying that letting them spend so much time together is why he isn’t talking.”
“I’m just suggesting that it could be a contributing factor… it’s that and probably also some other mutism that we should really work on in a clinic.”
Pops looked at Hiro, then sighed. “I’d hoped that raising them together would encourage him to compete against his cousin and advance himself, or at least to develop some brotherly loyalty and trust. They've always been very close. But if it’s doing him more harm than good… Better to cut with a sharp knife.”
“What does that mean? Pops?”
Pops reached out to Hiro, picking him up under the armpits and popping him into his arms. Hiro grabbed back, nuzzling into the thick feather collar on his jacket. He didn’t get a whole lot of hugging time with Pops so he was going to enjoy every second of it. He smelled nice and clean and he was always warm.
“Pops? What - where are you going?”
“I’m going to have to take him away from you. It’s for his own good, Ryota. Being around you’s broken him. Didn’t you hear what the doctor said? He can’t get better unless he’s forced to speak for himself.”
“That’s not strictly what I-”
“Shut up. You’re dismissed.”
“Pops - Hiro? Hiro!”
They were moving towards the door. Fear suddenly sliced through Hiro’s stomach. What did he mean, taking him away? Taking him away from home? From their family? The musty scent of laundry detergent turned sour. He patted, then grabbed at the feathers, trying to look over Pop’s shoulders. Ryota - Ryota -
“Put ‘im down! Wait!” Ryota’s voice cracked in a wail.
Hiro tried to wiggle himself up, but Pops’ grip was like iron. “Hiroto, don’t you want to be cured?” He murmured over Ryota’s yelling. “You're sick. Being alone is going to be your medicine. We don’t have to do this. You just need to ask.”
Hiro opened his mouth. Something was pressing up in his throat, like he’d swallowed a too-big pill. Ryota. He couldn’t leave him. He couldn’t get taken away. Not Ryota, not his big cousin who played thieves and villains with him and cut Hiro’s apples up with the pocket knife he stole from uncle Toya. Anything but that.
“I’ll freeze you! I’ll freeze you right here-”
No. No, Ryota couldn’t use his quirk. Not on Pops. He couldn’t. He had to know the rules.
Hiro opened his mouth again. The door handle clicked. Tears were streaming down Hiro’s face, burning hot. His throat wasn’t moving. Like he was being strangled from the inside.
“Aren’t you going to say goodbye to your cousin, boy?”
“Hiro!”
“ please. “
It was a ragged wheeze. Barely audible. Pops opened the door, then stopped, leaning down to unlatch a screaming Ryota from his leg. Over his shoulder Hiro saw the doctor standing off to the side, her hands over her mouth.
“What was that?”
Hiro pressed his face into Pop’s collar, quietly sobbing. “Please,” he whispered. “Please.”
Pops pulled him back by the collar of his medical gown, looking down at him appraisingly. Hiro shivered. The effort of consciously forcing his throat open, to make that terrible noise, while everyone’s eyes were on him, was too much. Pops reached up with a gloved hand and gently swiped the hair out of his son’s face, pressing his thumbs under his eyes.
“Oh, my darling boy. Listen to you. I know you could do it.” He turned back into the office, pulling Hiro close against himself. Ryota was quiet now. Everything was still and trembling. “All you had to do was ask.”
This was definitely a good and reasonable idea.
It was black, terrifyingly dark in the hallway. On either side of Pops’ door stretched miles of dark walls with terrifying portraits looming down at Hiroto, their eyes following him wherever he went. To a five-year-old there was possibly nothing scarier, except for the creature hiding under his bed in his room at the other end of the hall.
He reached out, tentatively, up to the handle of the door in front of him. Then he pulled it back.
Pops didn’t like people in his room; Hiroto could count on one little hand how many times he’d been here. When Father was home, mostly, when he swept him up in his arms and brought him in to read him stories on their big bed. Father was out of the country on another work trip now, and it was just Pops there alone.
Pinned between the needle of terror and the stiff corkboard of propriety; knowing that Pops could easily banish anything lying in wait to hurt his son.
Finally he made up his mind, pulling down the handle and peeking in. It was black inside, and the door creaked a little. The entire mansion was silent. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.
He slipped in, not wanting to close the door after him and lose the last sliver of low faint window-light that he had. Shuffling across the floor so that he didn’t trip over any carpets, hands out, he made his way to where he thought that he remembered the big bed to be. Finally he fumbled at something soft; then, with some pats, he discerned a blanket on a western-style bed. A little further up and he was tugging at Pop’s warm arm.
The man startled awake.
“Pops?”
“Hiroto.” His voice was low, sleep-grizzled and surprised. “What is it?”
Hiroto balled his fingers into fists. It was cold and he was so, so tired, and now standing here he felt like a ridiculous little baby inconveniencing his father like this, violating his sanctum. Getting his germs everywhere.
“There’s. A monster under my bed,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“A monster.”
A moment of silence.
“Is that so.”
He nodded, even though it probably wouldn’t be visible in the dark. “I know it’s down there. It’s been there all week.” Ever since Father left again.
Pops sighed heavily, and there was the sound of the mattress creaking. “There’s no such thing as monsters, Hiroto.” A heavy hand found the top of Hiroto’s head, resting in his hair. “The only monsters are other people, and you’re already more than strong enough to destroy them yourself now. Alright?”
Something pressed up in his throat, like he’d swallowed one of Oji-san’s marbles. There were such things as monsters - otherwise what was underneath his bed, churning quietly, malevolently, waiting for the lights to turn off so that it could seep out from underneath and grab at the child trying desperately to pretend it didn’t exist? Pops and Father and his uncles would be brave enough to ignore it but Hiro, Hiro was tiny and so scared.
Eyes smarting, blinking away tears, he nodded underneath Pop’s bare hand. It slipped down around his face, a thumb brushing at the desiccated skin under his eyes, and then absently patted him.
“Good boy. Go back to bed.”
The weight slipped off of him and the sound of bedding rustling told Hiroto that he was being summarily dismissed. He stood there, for a moment, waiting for something more to happen, and then he turned and shuffled back into the hall and closed the door behind himself.
He couldn’t go back to bed. He couldn’t go back there. He couldn’t. The lump in his throat grew and he dropped down to a crouch, sitting on the balls of his feet. He was so tired, he was so tired that he almost couldn’t be scared, but he knew that the second he got back to his room it would be waiting for him again.
As much as he wanted to cry, he couldn’t allow himself to. Pops would never approve of it, and the only thing worse than being gruesomely killed would be for Pops to be disappointed in how he comported himself - but Pops had sent him away!
The portraits were staring at him again. He could feel their prickling gaze, as heavy on his neck as Pop’s hand had been. He got up.
Down the hall, towards the great big window that threw in enough moonlight for him to see clearly, then up the stairs, and down the hallway in the opposite direction to the very end. Following the long built-in carpet he got to a different door, one that he felt a little less hesitancy in opening.
Once again he found himself at the side of a bed in a dark room. He reached up, patting at the top of the bed until he found someone’s body.
“Uncle?” he asked quietly. Someone groaned. “Uncle Chrono?”
“Mm, Hiro?”
He balled his little fists against his sides again. “Monster under my bed.” No need to explain any further.
Uncle Chrono sighed. More shuffling. “... Do you want to stay here with us tonight? Just this one time?”
“Was’ going on?”
“It’s Hiro. He had a nightmare.”
“It’s a monster under my bed,” he corrected, his voice wobbling just a little. He did want to climb up and curl up between his uncles like he used to do when he and Ryota were babies, but… Ryota was big enough to sleep on his own now, and he never had to ask anyone’s help with monsters. Probably took care of them himself. He didn’t want to be the family scaredy-cat.
The sound of things creaking, and then his eyes adapted a little better to the darkness and he saw one of his uncles swing his legs over the side of the bed and stand up.
With a guttering crack the whole room was illuminated in bright blue as Uncle Dabi produced a little flame in one hand so Hiroto could see him better. He was wearing a loose shirt and boxers, and Chrono was totally hidden under the comforter. Dabi reached down so Hiro could take his hand. It was callused and bony, like someone who knew what he was doing.
“Monster, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Wonder if it’s fireproof. I doubt it. Wanna go check with me?”
He considered it for a moment. It would be a display of force even if they didn’t catch the monster, and it would probably not be quick to return. He nodded.
“Mkay. C’mon, kid.” And Hiro led him down the hall, illuminated by the little shifting light that Dabi produced for them. The eyes of the portraits seemed to dance as they passed, but Hiroto didn’t have to look at them now. He could keep looking ahead.
Later, curled up with his mimic plush toy and swaddled in blankets after a thorough fire-lit search of his room capped off with a vigorous verbal threat to any potential monsters, he could finally try to get to sleep comfortably. Maybe someday he’d learn how to fight monsters on his own, or at least he wouldn’t be scared of them.
One thing he was sure about - Pops was never wrong, but in this case Hiroto had to make an exception - monsters did exist. He’d seen their many-eyed faces churning in the shafts of moonlight, he’d seen the glint of their teeth. And he had been afraid.
Someone was shaking Ryota.
Oh shit, did he oversleep again? What day was it...? No, it was still dark. Like, the 4 am flavor of dark - there was just the suggestion of stringy anemic light outside his window.
The shaking stopped just as something heavy collapsed on his bed between him and the wall that his bed was pushed up against. An arm wrapped around his shoulders, and he sleepily reciprocated before he fully knew what was going on.
“Whassit? Hiro?”
From right up against him - “Mhmm.”
They were, strictly speaking, too fucking old for this. But whatever, Hiro was always the exception to these unwritten rules. So he pulled his cousin brusquely into his chest. “What’s up? The dream again?”
“Yeah. The usual. Except he was over my bed this time.”
“Like on the ceiling? Creepy.”
“Like a… like a chandelier. But one of the ones that’s flat on the ceiling, not a hanging one. Just staring down at me. And I couldn’t move. And then his face..” Hiro gestured around his own, in the dark. “It was decaying down, and then it was mine for a second…”
“Damn, bud, that’s deep. Your face on a monster? The imagery. Wow.” Ryota ran a hand up through his cousin's hair, gently scratching at his scalp in the comforting way that he knew he liked. “Did it say anything? Like, uh. ‘Look inside yourself.. All along… the monster… was YOU… a 14 year old who rescues worms from the sidewalk…”
Hiro was gently laughing against him now. “Be quiet.”
“You be quiet, I’m tryin’ to sleep here.”
He wrapped himself up in the smell of fabric softener and Hiro’s warm heaviness. Hiro’d been having nightmares like this since they were kids, but they’d become few and far between now that they were older. Always the same monster, always the same freezing. Sleep paralysis, Pops had explained; when the brain wakes up before the body and starts making things up. That and an overactive imagination.
Understanding what was going on didn’t seem to make Hiro any less affected by it. He put on a brave face for his father, but Ryota knew better.
Only Ryota knew that he still had them, because whenever he had them he’d cross the hallway early in the morning and climb into his bed and scare the hell out of him and put his cold feet against his legs. Always shaking scared after a night of being pinned down, unable to move, while a monster stalked his room. Ryota’d make a sleepy joke about how silly he was being, and that seemed to calm him down enough to sleep. They never talked about it in the morning.
It was nice, in a strange way. They already shared everything, sure, but the yakuza was already sort of one big organic mess of people that shared everything already, and this was one very important thing that Hiro trusted him and him alone with.
Regardless of their predetermined positions - Hiro as the inheritor of the PLF leadership, Ryota as his future lieutenant - it felt like a precious little gem that he got to keep, this trust, this secret. He collected his cousin’s secrets like antique jewelry in the jewel-box of his mind. People in their family had a lot of things to hide, a lot of skeletons in closets, but the two of them didn’t have any from one another.
Hiro was more or less asleep again, judging by the gentle even breaths. He stilled his hand in his shaggy dark hair, enjoying the haziness of sleep creeping in like little waves.
Ah, he knew what it was.
Tomorrow (today, actually, at this point) was the Old Boss’s funeral. That’s probably what had him all worked up. They’d never known the man, the skeletal figure wasting away in a dusty room, artificially supported by machines. Hiro had been terrified by it all.
Pops and Ryota’s father held the man in almost mythical regard though, and so despite his uselessness they kept him around until he aspirated and died of pneumonia. An undignified end.
He closed his eyes. If you have to cut, use a sharp knife, Pops said. Should’ve taken his own advice, now his son was wigging out again.
When he woke up a little later, it had gotten properly bright outside. Hiro was still asleep next to him, having stolen most of his duvet during his fitful night. Well, he reasoned, he was practically half Ryota’s size, he needed the extra padding. He got up and put on his father’s old worn cotton yukata and toddled off to the bathroom to wash up.
Took an extra five minutes to make sure that his braid looked okay, because he didn’t have the time to redo it more than a few times a week, checked to see if there was anything to shave on his face - nope, still smooth all over - took a microshower and came back to wake up Hiro while he brushed his teeth.
His cousin was up already looking bleary-eyed. He was only a year younger than Ryota, but he was still a lot smaller. In the communal I’m With Destro t-shirt he was swimming in he still looked like a kid. He looked up at Ryota and smiled.
“Morning.”
“‘Sup.”
“Thanks for letting me sleep over.”
Ryota swallowed his toothpaste. “No problem. Weirded out about the funeral or something?”
Hiro moved to nod, then took a breath and shook his head. “Well, I mean, on an existential level, I guess. If it were someone I met and cared… well… cared about, you know, it’d probably be a lot more, uh… anxiety producing. But actually… there’s something else that happened that I think got me nervous. It’s not bad!” he added when he saw Ryota intensely drop his toothbrush in his front pocket. “It’s good. It’s really good, I, uh, think, but…”
“What’s going on?” Ryota frowned down at him, popping his hands on his hips in front of him. Hiro looked up at him through his flippy brown bangs. He hated having them cut, didn’t like people seeing the cracked, scarred skin around his eyes. Ryota thought it made him look like one of those sad yappy dogs rich ladies had, and besides, he liked his eyes. They were a striking red like his Father's.
Hiro reached behind himself and pulled up an envelope. He must have gotten it from his room while Ryo was in the shower.
“So. It’s my 15th birthday tomorrow.”
“Happy early birthday, current birthday week, yes, I know.”
“And I’ll be old enough to start high school…”
“Which I had assumed was a moot point since we’ve both been homeschooled for our entire life.”
Hiro bit his lower lip and held the envelope out to Ryota. “W… haven’t you ever wanted to go to an actual school, though?”
Ryota took the envelope and held it at arm’s length, the plain whiteness of it and the ripped-open top, and pulled out the papers inside. A nice thick envelope, lots of stuff inside. Money? Drugs? No, just paper. Boring.
Dear Mr. Hiroto Irinaka, it started. Thank you for your application to next year’s UA Hero Academy class. We are pleased to inform you that your academic record and background check have rendered you eligible for the qualifying admission exam… he only skimmed the rest. Official looking letterhead, information on date and time, blah blah blah.
He let his hand and the envelope in it to fall to his side.
“Hiro.”
“Ryota.”
“Are you still going on about this? I thought you stopped being obsessed with heroes like, years ago.” He made sure that heroes was whispered. That profession wasn’t talked about in their household. The very mention of them was enough to set Pops off on an hour long rant. With hives. Uncle Shigaraki talked about them mockingly, and it never put him in a good mood. They'd lost coworkers and family members to that simpering little species that styled themselves saviors of the world.
“I’m interested in them in an anthropological sense,” Hiro explained quickly. “I want to take them apart and see how they work. And what’s a better way to find out how to beat them than joining up with them?”
“Hiro, is it crack your smoking? Hiroto? Crack? Go to a hero school to learn how to be a hero? In the most dangerous place in the world for you? The son of two global villains?”
“Yeah, it’s going to be dangerous. But think of the strategic value. I mean… we’ve learned a lot about how our quirks work here, but they churn out real powerhouses over there, so they’ve got to have something to teach us. And we can earn their trust, do some reconnaissance-”
“We.”
“We.” He shyly pulled a second, unopened envelope from behind himself and held it up for Ryota to examine. “Even if Pops would let me go, he absolutely wouldn’t let me go alone.”
Oh the little fucker. The absolute steel-plated gall. He was impressed. Ryota shook his head. “You schemey little bastard,” he said adoringly, snatching the second envelope out of his hand and ripping it open.
Dear Mr. Ryota Irinaka, thank you for your application to next year’s UA Hero Academy class. We are pleased to inform you that your academic record and background check have rendered you eligible for the qualifying admission exam. Please refer to the rest of this packet for information regarding time, date and location..
“So you’ll come with me when I tell Pops?”
“Hiro, I think you’ve genuinely got a death wish.”
Hiro reached out and tugged Ryota up to him by the loops of his robe and hugged him around the waist. “No, I just want to live the life that I have.”
Ryota groaned. “How’m I supposed to say no to that?”
“You don’t…”
He groaned theatrically and patted Hiro’s head. “Why’d you have to use Uncle Mimic’s last name though? I don’t want to be a tailor.”
“It’s a common last name, so it won’t be too suspicious. And he was the one that forged all our paperwork for me to apply, anyways, so as far as anyone there knows he’s our father.”
“OUR father? We’re brothers!?!”
“For the sake of our school application yeah - and we already kind of are, when you think about it-”
“Brothers! You’re my brother!” Ryota beamed.
“Yes, you are! You know that already!”
Someone knocked at his door. “Ryota? Is Hiro in there?”
“Yeah, we’re getting ready!”
“Get ready quickly!” Chrono called. “We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
Hiro grumbled; Ryota ruffled his hair. “Come on, you heard the boss. Might want to wait a little bit before you bring up sleepaway hero school with Pops, I feel like he’s going to be in a weird mood today. Or maybe that’s a reason to ask now while he’s distracted… hm…”
Hiro’d gotten up, on his way back to his room to get dressed, but he stopped at the door and turned. Smiled that secret little smile for him only.
“Thanks, Ryo, love you,” he said, his voice small but bubbling with happiness. That was the only way he wanted Hiro to sound, and so despite his misgivings, Ryota smiled back.