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There are times when Inko finds herself awake when the rest of the world is asleep, times when the universe and its untold secrets offer its kiss of sweet dreams, times when chaos reigns and bring about nightmares, times when the sun is yet to rise, the moon yet to sink.
It is during these hours that Inko finds herself making her way towards her son's room, opening the door just a sliver, and listening to the consistent beep beep beep of a machine that tells her her son is alive. There are times when she would stand there, silently watching the rise and fall of Izuku's chest, counting each breath like one would count sheep to fall asleep. She will stay like that for an hour or two, until her fears settle, until she can reassure herself that he’s still here, fading and dying but here.
There are times when she would sit by his bedside, hands encircling his ever-thinning ones, and she would lay her head beside him, eyes closing in prayer. She ignores how she knows there is no answer to them.
Tonight is not one of those nights.
Tonight nothing can assuage her fears.
Tonight she opens her eyes and finds herself staring at the unfamiliar blue ceiling she’s grown accustomed to in the past few weeks. Tonight her feet pads on carpeted floor and numbly, she notes, that she misses the wooden ones of her old apartment. Tonight she takes a peek in Izuku’s room, watch the moonlight spill over him, and she closes the door as silently as she could. Tonight, she escapes the confines of their little room and steps out into the common room.
Tonight is game night, if Inko remembers correctly; it explains the state of disarray the kids had left the living room in. Pillows are left scattered on the floor, sofas moved together on one side near the TV, and board games left on another pile by the table. Unsurprisingly, aside from the whiteboard that tallies the score between Pink Rangers and Lazy Lightning, nothing is amiss.
They’re good kids, Inko muses, eyes tracing the short path to the kitchen and seeing all the dishes had been washed clean.
Idly, she rearranges the furniture back to where they should be, dragging the heavier ones with her quirk. She puts the board games back in the cabinet under the stairs, wipes the already spotless tables clean, and just as she was about to pull the broom out, someone clears their throat behind her.
Inko doesn’t startle like she used to do, not when every single time she tries to be useful, someone else will swoop in and take the job out of her hands and tell her to sit down, take it easy, and let them handle it. She’s tired of letting people handle things. She’s tired of people thinking she is incapable. She’s tired of people failing her. Instead, she blinks, and looks at the outside world right across her. The skies are still tinged with the vast darkness she woke up to, with no hint of dawn over the horizon. She hasn’t been awake yet for far longer that she’d been asleep, not that a scant of three hours was something to gloat over. Turning around, she sees tired eyes watching her, matched with a worried expression she doesn’t know how to deal with.
“Good evening, Hitoshi,” Inko say, as if meeting the boy in the dead hours of night was a normal occurrence.
“I – good evening, Mrs. M,” Hitoshi says after a minute, as if seeing a ghost. He stands there awkwardly, unsure of what to do, and Inko doesn’t have the heart to leave him to himself.
“Inko, dear,” she reminds him.
Hitoshi only blinks at her.
“Would you like to help me clean?” Hitoshi eyes the already spotless living room, the broom in her idle hands, and notices the lack of board games or strewn pillows on the floor.
“We have a vacuum,” he says finally. Inko tries not to frown at him.
“It’s two AM, dear.”
Something clicks in Hitoshi’s face and he flushes, the tips of his ears a shade of pink. Inko thinks it’s adorable. It’s a common mistake, especially with kids who are not familiar with how loud vacuums can be. She remembers Izuku waking her up with it when he has six years old and trying to act like a big boy after he accidentally knocked over the flower vase by his merchandise shelf in the living room. She had to tell him that you can’t vacuum broken glass or you risk breaking it. Granted, what woke her up was Izuku falling over after trying to drag the vacuum from the utility closet.
“It doesn’t make much noise,” Hitoshi says, breaking her free from memory. “Hatsume made it special. She said it’s so we don’t bother anyone.”
So it doesn’t bother Izuku, Inko’s mind supplies, for when he already sleeps so little.
Hitoshi fidgets under her gaze, uncertain. He reminds her so much of Izuku when he was younger and unsure, back when he didn’t have a quirk yet, back when other kids were so mean to him that Izuku can’t stay still without his hands doing anything. Hitoshi’s tells are his eyes, darting back and forth from the floor to his feet to his hands – anywhere but at her. He waits as if he’s waiting for something worse. Inko stows away the broom and gestures for him to lead the way. Ten seconds later, she and Hitoshi are by the sofa discussing the ins-and-outs of the blue vacuum with a huge Hatsume Industries on top. He tells her its different functions, what buttons to push depending on the intensity level she wants it to eat away the dirt, and all the other stuff she easily files away for future references.
It’s easy for Inko to memorize instructions. She remembers, even years later, how to fix a leaky faucet, unclog the toilet, and repair an air-conditioner that lost its cool. It happens when you live alone. It happens when you raise a son on your own. She remembers even when she stopped doing them after Izuku learned how to. And she didn’t had to re-learn them when she was left all alone.
This is how Ochako finds them at three am, with Hitoshi pushing on one end of the couch so Inko can vacuum underneath. Ochako doesn’t hesitate to step in and lift the couch with her quirk, supporting the other end so it doesn’t touch the ceiling.
“Thank you, dear,” Inko tells her, then, with a pause, “did we wake you?”
Ochako shakes her head after pulling the couch down and releasing her quirk in the process. “I was hungry,” she tells her. Inko decides to ignore the way her stomach doesn’t grumble, the way the dark rings beneath her eyes are darker. She turns to Hitoshi, the same question to her lips and the boy shrugs with the word insomnia as his excuse.
Considering the living room clean enough, Inko makes up her mind.
“Let’s go into the kitchen, I’ll prepare you some snacks.”
Neither kids deny her this.
And this is how Tenya finds them, with Ochako and Hitoshi sitting by the kitchen counter, discussing the specifics of Blokus and how Ochako is a little cockroach that just won’t stop finding little spaces in the board to put her pieces in while Mrs. Midoriya filled the kitchen with the bittersweet scent of hot cocoa, words of reprimand dying on his lips.
“Good morning, Tenya-kun,” Inko says as she watches the boy fumble for words, mouth opening and closing without saying anything.
Instead, he settles with a quiet, “Good morning, Mrs. Midoriya,” and before she can correct him that it’s Inko, dear, he adds, “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”
“Insomnia,” Hitoshi grumbles, starting the next game with a red tile.
“Hungry,” Ochako pipes in. “Are you playing with us this round, Auntie Inko?”
“In the next round, dear. Would you like to join us, Tenya-kun? I made extra cocoa. Grilled cheese should be ready in a couple of minutes.”
Unable to protest, Ochako pulls him in and began explaining the rules in the process of their game.
Inko tunes them out and flips the grilled cheese on the other side.
It’s like Tetris but you have to fill in the board by connecting your pieces by the edges, mama!
The same colors can’t be beside each other. That’s a big no-no!
Edge to edge only, mama!
Ah! Mama, that’s unfair! How did you even fit there!
Mama is magic.
Inko takes the grilled cheese off the pan and brings it to the table.
She starts dominating the board by the next round.
The next time Inko escapes to the common kitchen, she notices that someone had already beaten her there and she wonders if it’s worth her peace of mind.
She can turn around right now and go back inside their room, lock herself up somewhere, and stare at the blank nothingness for hours on end until the sun rises – but that’s not how Inko deals with things. Inko can’t not do anything. Heights Alliance may not be her house but it is where Izuku is, so it is where her home should be, and that is enough for her to make up her mind.
…
Perhaps it may have been wiser to stay inside after all but what’s done is done and Toshinori had spotted her, freezing as he had just turned around from the stove, hands stilling from what she can smell as a cup of freshly brewed tea.
She had not thought this through. To be frank, she had not expected to see him at all.
A couple of days ago, Izuku barged into their shared room looking rumpled and tired, but what worried her were the puffiness of his eyes and the anger that raged his shoulders and for the life of her, he wouldn’t tell her what happened. What she only knew then was that he had talked with All Might and it didn’t end well. She didn’t know why. She had figured it was another one of All Might’s stupid requests of asking Izuku about One for All back and she remembered how well that had gone the first time around.
Then Izuku actively avoided Toshinori and Toshinori reciprocated.
Izuku avoided talking about him at all and it wasn’t until inko sat him down and refused to leave him alone that he finally told her what happened.
All Might had called him ambitious.
All Might had called him selfish.
The nerve of that man who had placed this curse on his baby, the audacity to call him selfish – that- that- that asshole!
Inko remembers agreeing to Izuku not to storm All Might in whatever hellhole he had decided to hide himself in. Inko remembers Izuku telling her it’s his fault. Inko doesn’t tell him she’s sorry. She tells him he’s enough.
And All Might had come out of hiding and Inko is burning with rage
How dare All Might call Izuku selfish when all Izuku has ever done is give and give until nothing is left of him? How dare All Might call Izuku ambitious when all he’s ever aimed to be is to be like him and come out better? How dare All Might hurt the boy he claimed to love as his own?
How dare he?
Inko doesn’t move from her spot by the entryway to the kitchen and the lanky man fidgets under her gaze.
Good, she thinks, because a man of his size is scared of a woman her size, someone only half his height. He should be. Inko had long stopped being afraid of him, long stopped worshiping the ground he walked on because it was all that Izuku had ever asked of her, long stopped trusting him to keep her son safe.
No one can keep Izuku safe. Not anymore.
“Midoriya-san,” Toshinori greets in the awkward silence.
“All Might,” she answers back. She relishes in the way he flinches at the unfamiliarity of it. She hasn’t called him that in so long that the name sounds foreign even to her own ears but he had lost that right and he will not earn it again without earning Izuku’s forgiveness – not that it’s hard. Izuku loves him, adores him, but he had hurt Izuku. The least he could do was apologize for it and not be a coward that –
Oh for goodness’ sake.
Inko refuses to be the bigger person tonight. She also, quite literally, cannot be. She’s only 160 cm.
Before Toshinori can speak again, she turns on her heels and marches back to their room.
She’ll get back to one of her books instead.
“Midoriya-san.”
“Aizawa-kun.”
Tonight isn’t the first night that Inko and Aizawa had found themselves in the kitchen together and Inko suspects it will not be the last. Tonight, however, is the first night she doesn’t correct him in calling her by her given name, not that it matters. Aizawa-kun has been… he’s been hard on himself, too hard, if Inko is being honest. She thinks that there’s a part of him that blames himself for whatever it is that is happening with Izuku. It’s out of his control. She understands this. She doesn’t blame him for it. A part of her thinks that he wishes she would. She doesn’t. A part of her wishes she would, too. She wants to blame him, blame UA, blame All Might, blame Izuku but… Izuku had been happy.
Izuku had been the happiest she’d ever seen him when he was given the chance to work on being a hero. He'd made friends he loves more than he loves heroes, teachers who care for him and protect him and fight for him, people who stand by his side and choose him just as he chooses them. People who chase after him and refuse to leave him alone. People who made him happy.
But… it’s also been the most hurt she’d seen him. The most tired. The most lost.
And now Izuku is dying.
She’s not sure if the tradeoff was worth it.
Until now, she still isn’t.
She doesn’t know how to feel about it – about this.
She’s happy that Izuku is happy but she’s never wanted this, never wanted to watch him waste away, never wanted to see him swaying on his feet, unable to stand on his own, barely even able to make a step forward without taking two steps back. It hurts. It hurts her and she doesn’t know how to deal with it. It hurts how she feels powerless in all this and it hurts her how Izuku must feel even more. Yet the world doesn’t stop, won’t stop, won’t slow, won’t listen, and all Inko has is now and this little chance to hold him close until she has to say goodbye.
And every day, every day she wakes up and she slips in his room, and she wonders if he will wake up, too – or if last night was the last night and she missed her chance, or if that afternoon was the day he’d drift, or if… she doesn’t know how many ifs she’d already asked. She doesn’t know how many more she can take. But each time she’s given the chance, just a little longer she holds on, doesn’t let go, and plants a kiss on his head and wishes it wasn’t the last.
Inko looks at the table and sees the papers in front of Aizawa-kun, recognizing the names of the hero agencies on top of each one – heroes who had been there in the Great War a couple of years ago, heroes who had failed her son, heroes who watched as a little boy fought a battle too great and had come out of it bruised and battered and scarred, heroes who sent out children to fight battles they were too young tobear , heroes who are… trying to do better.
Inko looks away and heads to the coffee machine, eyeing the pot she assumes Aizawa-kun already prepared from himself. When he doesn’t stop her, she pours herself a cup.
They sit in silence like that, Aizawa with his papers, and his burdens, and his guilts, and Inko with her book, and her thoughts, and her second cup of coffee.
She’s been reading a lot, lately. It was an old hobby of hers, something to keep her busy when she’s left alone on her own. Frankly, it’s what gotten her into baking, and mechanics, and first aid. She always did enjoy learning. Perhaps it’s one of the few things she’d ever shared with Izuku genuinely. She never did like heroes but Izuku loved them and it wouldn’t ever hurt learning about them.
Learning never hurt anyone.
It’s just…
“Midoriya-san?”
Sometimes she just…
“Midoriya-san, are you-“
She wishes there was a book about this –something that tells her just how hard it is to lose a child. Something that tells her that the world is unfair, that it is unkind, that it is cruel and cold and unforgiving and she is so damn tired of every book that tells her to be strong, to keep on holding and fighting and hoping for brighter days. There are no brighter days. She doesn’t feel there ever will be. (She knows this a lie, she knows it is, but damn it, it’s the most painful lie that feels so close to the truth. There are brighter days ahead but she doesn’t have it in her to believe in them. Not anymore. Not when they've taken away her only reason for choosing to stay.)
She barely feels it when hesitant arms wrap around her, wrecking sobs breaking each breath, and she can’t help but wish that it was Izuku holding her.