Chapter Text
“Katsuki.”
“Mnh.”
A hand strokes gently through his hair, pulling him a little further awake. Katsuki groans and tries to escape the disturbance, pushing his face into the surface he’s lying on.
Eijirou huffs out a quiet laugh. “C’mon, this is important. You have to get up soon anyways, otherwise you won’t sleep tonight.”
Katsuki ignores him; if he just falls back to sleep, maybe Eijirou will go away. Even though Katsuki’s head is on his thigh. He can hear that the TV is still on, but the volume is lower than before he succumbed to his accidental nap. He should have known better than to lie down. It’s always a trap.
“Katsukiiiii.” Eijirou taps him a few times on the forehead.
“Whadda y’want?” Katsuki squints his eyes open and rolls over to glare at his stupid husband. He’s holding his phone in one hand, and he smiles brightly down at Katsuki.
“Ocha and Izuku want us to babysit tomorrow night. You up for it?” Eijirou’s red hair is escaping from his bun in little tendrils around his face, his garish orange hoodie clashing horribly with it.
“You woke me up for that?” Katsuki huffs and turns back around, closing his eyes tight in futile protest of being awake. “Never need to ask…’s always yes…”
Eijirou snorts. “Like I said, you gotta get up anyways, that was like a two-hour nap.” He shakes Katsuki’s shoulder roughly. “C’mon, it’s nice out. We could go for a walk before dinner?”
Katsuki sighs deeply, and then pushes himself upright with a wide yawn, feeling some of the scar tissue on his face pull with it. “Alright, sure.” His muscles are stiff and a little sore from his morning training, but it will feel good to get out and move again.
“River park?” Eijirou leans over to kiss Katsuki’s temple before getting to his feet, his knees cracking as he straightens up.
“Yes, fine,” Katsuki groans, shuffling into the bedroom to change. He rubs at the crick in his neck; the inevitable consequence of being thirty-three and sleeping on a leg for two hours.
“And can you make hamburger for dinner?”
“We had that last week!”
“So? It’s good!”
“Well, we have to get groceries then.”
“I’ll bring the backpack, we can stop on the way home.”
“Might as well get some shit for tomorrow, then, too. Picky brat…”
“UNCLE KACCHAN!” Ryuka screeches, flying through the door and crashing into Katsuki’s legs at full speed. “Uncle Kacchan, look, look!”
Before Katsuki has time to do more than blink down at her, she rips away from him, squeezes her eyes shut, and breathes out a jet of fire.
“Woah- shit!” Katsuki blinks, impressed.
“Katsuki!” Eijirou yells from the living room. “What did I tell you about swearing in front of children!”
“She just breathed fire in the genkan, Eijirou, what was I supposed to say!?”
“Anything but a swear word!”
“Don’t worry too much about it, she’s heard worse.” Izuku is still standing in the doorway, looking exhausted and bemused. “From you, but still.”
“But that’s not even the best part!” Ryuka declares, still fixated on Katsuki, “Watch this!” She breathes out another jet of fire, but before it can go out, she swirls her hand around in the air, and the fire follows. She spins around a little, taking the fire with her as it hovers just over her right hand, then she puffs it out with a clumsy flourish over her head. “Like Uncle Shouto, but I can move it!”
“Pyrokinesis, huh? That’s wicked,” Katsuki grins at her, and she shrieks with excitement.
“I’m the coolest kid at school now! I’m the first one to get a quirk, did you know that, Uncle Kacchan? And it’s an awesome one!” Ryuka’s physical resemblance to Izuku and Ochako is unmistakeable – with her thick brown hair, round eyes and face, freckles and short stature – but her personality reminds Katsuki a little too much of himself.
“Alright, alright, you’re very cool, now say bye to your dad and go bother Uncle Red, huh?” Katsuki says, reaching down to ruffle Ryuka’s hair. She’s called Eijirou ‘Uncle Red’ basically from the day she was able to talk, because of his hair as much as his hero name.
“Bye, dad!” Ryuka waves vaguely in Izuku’s direction and then sprints off into the living room, leaving her little duffle bag and her kicked-off shoes in a haphazard pile on the genkan floor.
“Thanks for taking her, Kacchan, I…” Izuku sighs and drags a hand down his face.
“Need a break, Symbol of Peace?” Katsuki raises his eyebrow at him.
“So bad,” Izuku whispers, looking guilty. “She’s already burned a hole in the couch and her bedsheets, and the preschool teacher says she’s been…a little mean, to some of the other kids, and I just don’t know how to talk to her, and she adores you and you’re so good with her and you and Eijirou are fireproof and I know you got those special sheets when you started having nightmares and I haven’t had time to get her some of her own ye-”
“Deku.” Katsuki holds up his hand to stop Izuku’s rambling. “Shut up. Seriously, it’s fine.”
From the living room, they hear Eijirou’s muted voice, and then a loud shriek of laughter from Ryuka.
“You gotta be a little tougher on her, about the bullying shit,” Katsuki tells Izuku. “I know it’s not in your…parent book, or whatever, since you were like the meekest little kid in the world, but I was a real piece of work, so take it from me. Firm hand, and all that.”
Izuku’s eyes go a little wide. “Uh…you sure? Your mom was-”
Katsuki snorts. “Okay, not that firm, but you get what I mean. Don’t tolerate her shit, yeah?”
Izuku hangs his head down. “Yeah…”
“Brat! Get in here and help me with dinner!”
“I’m not a brat, you can’t call me that!” Ryuka stomps into the kitchen anyways, sticking her tongue out at Katsuki.
“C’mon, get up here and help me.” With his foot, he nudges the little wooden stool he bought for this exact purpose, and she climbs up onto it. “Here, stir this pot.”
“Okaaay,” She rolls her eyes, but she takes the spoon and stirs the curry, fairly competently for such a small kid. Katsuki bumps her shoulder gently with his, and she giggles, instantly cheerful again.
“How come Uncle Red never has to help?”
“Oh, he does. He cleans the dishes. That’s the best part about cooking, your chore gets done first.”
“When I’m a hero, I’ll get someone to cook and clean for me! Cooking is a waste of time,” Ryuka cackles, and Katsuki snorts out a surprised little laugh at how comically evil it sounds.
“Hey, I’m a famous hero and I don’t have anyone to cook for me,” Katsuki says with a sidelong look at her.
She pauses, opens her mouth and then closes it again, and then says, “Hmm. Well, why not?”
“I like cooking. Sometimes, making things with your own hands is satisfying.”
Ryuka turns back to the curry and furrows her brow in thought, then with the lightning-fast speed of a child’s attention span, she whirls toward Katsuki again. “After dinner, can we go to the quirk gym? Pleeeeease!”
“The quirk gym? You’re five, how do you even know what that is.”
“Dad took me there so I could use my quirk and not burn any more stuff! But I wanna fight with Dynamight and Red Riot! Dad says I can’t fight him or mom ‘cause I’ll burn them. Pleeease!”
Katsuki’s mouth twists with the effort of holding in another smile. “Sure you don’t wanna do something normal, like colouring?”
“Nope! I wanna fight you!” She punches Katsuki in the arm with her free hand, the spoon in her left lifting out of the curry and splattering some onto the stove.
“Oi, careful with that!” Katsuki snatches a cloth and wipes up the spill, then shoves the spoon safely back into the pot. “Fine, we can go to the quirk gym, you little hero nerd.”
“I’m not a nerd, you’re a nerd!” She pouts at him a little bit, but then she wiggles in excitement at Katsuki’s ‘yes’.
“She’s not wrong,” Eijirou snickers, coming up behind Katsuki and wrapping an arm around his waist.
“That’s it, you’re both getting blown up.”
Ryuka cackles again, and Eijirou presses a quick kiss to the back of his neck that makes him shiver.
Since she only manifested her quirk a week ago, Ryuka still doesn’t have any fire-proof clothing, so she borrows one of Katsuki’s shirts. She wears little biking shorts on underneath it, but it’s so long it looks like a dress on her, coming down just past her knees.
“Can I keep this?” She turns her best doe-eyes on Katsuki, blinking up at him and pulling on the hem of the black skull T-shirt.
“Of course you can!” Eijirou interjects before Katsuki can answer. “It looks so cute on you I can barely handle it.” He lifts his phone up and snaps a few pictures while Ryuka giggles and poses for him.
Katsuki rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, alright, fine. Now show me what you got, brat.” He drops into a fighting stance and grins at her.
She makes a little growling sound and scrunches up her face, then blows fire and throws it directly at Katsuki’s chest. He swipes it aside with his hand and redirects it away from himself with a little explosion puff.
“That it?”
After a while the whole thing just devolves into wrestling, mostly Ryuka clinging to Katsuki’s back while he pretends to shake her off. Eijirou stands mostly still, in fear of cutting Ryuka with his quirk, but she climbs all over him like a jungle gym anyways. Occasionally she breaks away from both of them to sprint around the gym and throw her fire around, laughing and screeching as Katsuki chases her.
“What are those?” Ryuka asks, pointing at the ear Katsuki is currently itching while they wait for Eijirou to finish in the shower.
“Hearing aids.” He’s surprised she hasn’t noticed them before now, although he hasn’t had them for that long. He turns his head to the side so she can see the left one better.
“What are they for?”
“They help me hear.”
“Why can’t you hear normal?”
Katsuki kneels down to Ryuka’s eye level. “About a year ago, I set off a huge explosion with my quirk, and it caught some other explosive sh- stuff, in the building I was in, and the sound it made was so loud that it damaged my hearing. My body was made to handle my regular blasts, but this was a really big one.” Almost killed him, too, but Ryuka doesn’t need to hear that part.
Ryuka’s eyes go wide. “That can happen?”
“Hero work is dangerous sometimes, kid,” Katsuki taps at the scars on his face. He has a few now, some from a couple deep slice wounds that didn’t quite heal fully and the rest from that same explosion that he lost his hearing in. He doesn’t feel self-conscious about them; every hero he knows has at least one. “Your dad’s got a few of these too, doesn’t he.”
Ryuka nods and reaches up with her tiny hand to trace over the old wounds. He can barely feel her fingers on the tough, healed skin.
“Yep!” Eijirou suddenly says from behind him, making Katsuki jump in surprise. Eijirou leans over and pulls up his sleeve, exposing some of the criss-crossing scars along his forearm. Katsuki doesn’t even remember where he got those, anymore. “I have them, too. Now, quit scaring her, Katsuki!”
Ryuka plants her hands on her hips and pouts. “I’m not scared!”
When they get back to the house, Ryuka insists on watching a movie, but she yawns through the first five minutes and crashes hard. By the time the hero sets off on his journey, her head is in Katsuki’s lap, fast asleep and probably drooling on his sweatpants.
“That quirk is gonna be nuts when she’s older,” Eijirou whispers to Katsuki.
“Gonna be one hell of a fighter,” Katsuki agrees.
“You know…you’re so good with her…” Eijirou trails off with a strange look on his face.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe we should…maybe we should have a kid too.”
Katsuki blinks. “Really?”
“Yeah, I mean…we’ve kinda talked about it before, and…” Eijirou rubs at the back of his neck, his mouth quirking up a little at the side. “I think you’d be a really good dad.”
Katsuki’s face burns red, and he clears his throat. “Yeah, well, y’know. I’m good at everything.”
“Soo…is that a yes?”
Katsuki takes in a deep breath, and then looks Eijirou in the eyes again. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s a yes.”