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Touya glares at Rumi and she wonders if the new ‘attacking heroes is bad’ version of him is reconsidering that line of thinking.
“I know how to look after children,” Rumi says. “I’ve worked with them before.”
Keigo tugs on Touya’s jacket. “I’m hungry,” he whines. “You said we’d go out for food so you can process accidentally revealing yourself to your siblings and then hope neither of them say —”
“If anything happens to Kumi,” Touya warns, pointing at Rumi with one hand and covering Keigo’s mouth with the other, “I will skin you alive and feed your screaming remains to a wild boar — Kei, stop kissing my hand.”
Keigo grins when Touya gives him an annoyed look and drops his hand.
“That’s gross, Touya Papa,” Kumi grumbles, wrinkling her nose. She hugs Touya and then Keigo. “Okay, now get out. I’ll be fine.”
Once they’re gone, Rumi turns to Kumi. “So, what do you like to do for fun?”
“You have to take me to the park because Touya Papa grounded Tenko. I’m all ready to go.”
“Am I allowed to take you outside?”
“You have to take her to the park because she always visits the park on Saturdays,” Tenko says, trudging out of the kitchen with a juice box in his hand. “She has to meet her best friend at least once a week and she hasn’t seen him at all this week.”
Kumi gestures to Tenko. “See? Let’s go!”
“I don’t even know where the park is.”
“It’s five blocks from the house,” Kumi says. “Giri made us walk once and I counted.”
Tenko gestures to the door. “Go on, babysitter.”
Rumi sighs and opens the door. “Let’s go.”
The walk there isn’t all bad. Kumi is very smart and she points out all the butterflies and flowers she sees by name, some of which Rumi didn’t even know.
“Have you been living in that house your whole life?” Rumi asks when Kumi stops naming butterflies and flowers.
“As far as I can remember. My papas say I used to live with Kei Papa super far away, but I burned his apartment down when I was super little so we had to move.”
“Oh? Were you trying to cook with him?”
“No, Touya Papa says I sneezed a little too hard.”
Rumi stares at Kumi. “Huh?”
“It’s my quirk,” Kumi says, looking up at Rumi. “Sometimes when I sneeze, I sneeze small fires. Kei Papa says that when I was a baby, I used to burp fire too.”
Rumi wonders what kind of a sneeze it had to have been to set the entire apartment on fire. She’d heard of the incident and was pissed that Keigo never told her where he moved to, but she never thought that the cause of the fire could have been a baby.
“And has anyone ever done anything dangerous with you?”
Kumi shrugs. “Some people kidnapped me last year, but everyone came to rescue me. There were also some other kids too, but we saved them. They live with Ms Hamasaki in Hiroshima now. They’re my friends. I visit them in the holidays and while we’re at school, I send them letters. Maki is the oldest, so she reads them to the others and writes back everything they all wanna say. Reiji is learning to read and write now, though. Maki says she wants to be like Ms Hamasaki when she’s big.”
“That’s nice. What do you wanna be when you’re big?”
Kumi frowns. “I wanted to be a vigilante like Tenko, but he says I’d be a good hero. I think I wanna think about it some more.”
“That’s okay. You have a lot of time.”
“I guess. But I don’t have to be a hero. I can do other work when I’m big, like Miko or Shuichi. I don’t think I wanna do work like Atsu, though.”
“Why?” Rumi asks, just a tiny bit concerned. “What does he do?”
“He does magic shows for kids’ parties. He wears a funny top hat and big glasses. They like his metal arm.”
Rumi wonders how the hell Atsuhiro is getting away with being a party trick when there are still people looking for the League. She supposes it’s probably the same way Himiko got a managerial position at a restaurant.
“What does Sp- Shuichi do?”
“He’s a hacker!”
“Hacking is a crime, you know.”
Kumi rolls her eyes. “Not that kind of hacker. He works for a bunch of companies to make sure that their computer system thingies are safe. So bad hackers can’t get in.”
“So he’s a whitehat?”
“Yes! That’s the word! He even does work for heroes sometimes, but they don’t know. That’s just ‘cause the heroes never hire him. Someone in the agency who works with computer stuff hires him to do the work.”
Rumi frowns. She’s pretty sure her agency’s system had a virus last week that was planted by a villain she was chasing, when it suddenly disappeared. Could it just be a coincidence? Unlikely.
“What does Dabi — uh, Touya do?”
Kumi hums. “He takes care of me mostly! When I’m at school, he goes to work, though.”
“Where does he work?”
“Touya Papa works at a pottery store! He makes really ugly mugs for us on his breaks, but it makes him happy because he can use his quirk to make things.”
“Oh.”
“Jin also takes care of me, but sometimes he works at a con-de-penance store.”
“Convenience store,” Rumi corrects, realising too late that she sounds just like Jin when he corrects Kumi’s speech.
“That. And Giri takes care of me and the house. He doesn’t have a real job yet, but he’s super fun and he taught me how to read. We jailbreak-ed him.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you did,” Rumi mutters, wondering how that never made it into the news.
Rumi’s met all of their friends — save for Daichi’s babysitter, whom Tenko apparently likes — but she’s not sure if any of them are secretly villains in hiding too.
“What about all their friends? What do they do?”
“Well, Iori is a nurse. Miko says she works at a nice hospital. She used to work at the restaurant with Miko, but now that she’s done with school, she went to work as a nurse. Miko met her at the restaurant, you know.”
“Cute,” Rumi says, because it kind of is.
“And Ms Hamasaki is Atsu’s friend. I only met her when I went to see my friends with Atsu the first time. But she knows Tenko from a long time ago. She says he saved her life but she didn’t tell me what happened because she doesn’t want my friends to know and she’s worried I’ll tell them. I don’t like keeping secrets from my friends.”
“I see.”
“Inaban works at my favourite store. Atsu takes me there all the time, so Inaban knows me super well now. Jin gets really red whenever he takes me there. I think he’s allergic to something in that store. But I think Inaban is better friends with Jin than with Atsu. They hang out a lot. I asked Jin if Inaban is his boyfriend like Iori is Miko’s girlfriend but he just started choking and never answered me.”
Rumi smiles. That’s kind of cute, too.
“And Natsu is Tenko’s best friend! We met him and Daichi at the park and he brings Daichi every Saturday so we can play and he can hang out with Tenko.”
“What about Sp- Shuichi? Does he have any friends?”
“Shuichi has online friends. They play games together when he’s not working. Sometimes Tenko plays with them. Kei Papa says that Shuichi is afraid of social inter-perception.”
“Interaction,” Rumi corrects.
“Right. That.”
“And your dads? Do they have any friends?”
“I guess you’re Kei Papa’s friend,” Kumi says, shrugging. “And he says there’s a younger hero he likes to work with sometimes. Uh, Tsukuyomi? He also says that Inaban and Iori are his friends.”
“Oh,” Rumi says, because with the way Keigo was trying to get rid of her when she broke into his house, she figured they were just coworkers after all. Then again, she did break into his house, so maybe that had something to do with it. And she’s babysitting Kumi now, so he clearly trusts her with his daughter.
“And Touya Papa has friends at work. He doesn’t let them come home because he says we’re all idiots on crack and we’ll scare his friends off and then his boss will fire him.”
“Idiots?” Rumi asks. “He didn’t say your uncles would scare his friends because they’re villains?”
Kumi stops at the outskirts of the park and tilts her head. “We’re not villains, though. People just think we are because we used to be. But we’re not.”
Rumi notes that even when Kumi talks about her family before her, she includes herself.
“Oh, there’s Daichi. Daichan!”
Rumi watches a kid with orange hair trip into the sandpit. “Micchan!”
She watches as both Kumi and a woman rush towards Daichi. Rumi follows.
“Where’s Natsu today?” Kumi asks, looking at Daichi’s new babysitter as she pulls Daichi to his feet.
“Oh, he’s sneaking into your house as we speak.”
“Aw, that means I can’t come play with Daichi after park time.”
“You can still come over to my house.”
Kumi visibly recoils. “I don’t like Endeavor.”
“You’re Todoroki Fuyumi?” Rumi asks.
Fuyumi squeaks. “Mirko?!”
“Shh!”
“Sorry!” Fuyumi adjusts her glasses. “Um. Hello. I didn’t know you knew Kumi.”
“I met her recently.”
“And . . . do you know everyone else?”
“Unfortunately. Toga’s pissed that she can’t claim to be Kumi’s only aunt anymore.”
Fuyumi giggles.
“Why are you pink?” Kumi asks Fuyumi.
Rumi nudges Kumi. “Go play.”
“Daichi, come on,” Kumi says, grabbing Daichi’s shirt and pulling him towards the slide.
“So . . . your brother is Daichi’s babysitter?”
“Yeah,” Fuyumi says. She gestures to the bench she’d gotten up from when Daichi fell. “Wanna sit?”
“Sure.”
“What are you doing out here?” Fuyumi asks when they’re seated under the shade of the tree behind the bench. “I thought you were based in Hiroshima.”
“I am. I was chasing Hawks. I thought he and Kumi needed rescuing from the League but, uh, turns out they’re kind of a family all together? I’m still not sure what’s going on over there.”
“That makes two of us,” Fuyumi says with an amused scoff. “On Thursday, my father got his ass handed to him at six in the morning on our front yard. Apparently, Tenko thinks all fathers with flame quirks are shitty dads.”
“Tenko beat Endeavor up?”
“Surprising, I know. That’s not even the strangest part. Apparently my dead brother is not dead and is in fact Dabi.”
“Oh, wow,” Rumi says. “That had to have been tough to find out.”
“I was a little preoccupied with having the Number One Hero concussed to actually process that. My brother also did the angry dad pose and grounded Tenko for wrecking the car and throwing parts of it at my father’s head. He was all ‘I don’t want to hear another word from you’ and had his hands on his hips and everything. Weird stuff.”
“Oh, is that why he’s grounded?”
“My father wanted to file a complaint about him, since I accidentally outed him as Noxious — look, he came to my house with black hair and a dark hoodie, anyone could’ve made the connection — but he didn’t want to admit that the skinny vigilante gave him a concussion so he just kinda let it go.”
Rumi snorts. “Yeah, I don’t blame him.”
“You won’t tell anyone, right?”
“Yeah, I’ll spare Endeavor the humiliation of —”
“Oh, no, not for him. I saw the way my brother looked at Tenko and I could tell that he cares a great deal for him. I don’t want to hurt my brother. Or Kumi.”
“Oh.”
“Weird, right? That I want to keep secret who they are.”
Rumi thinks about Inaba Kosuke, Hamasaki Ichika, Yanase Iori and everyone else who refused to tell her anything of substance when she questioned them. “Nah, it’s more common than you’d think. Besides, if Endeavor decides he’s not going to pursue it, then there’s no reason to make a big deal out of it.”
“Hey, do you think you could do me a favour?” Fuyumi asks, turning to face Rumi.
“Hm?”
“You seem like you know Kumi’s family well enough. I mean, they’re letting you babysit Kumi outside the house. Could you . . . could you tell my brother I want to meet him? You don’t have to convince him or anything. Just tell him that. Please?”
There’s no harm in passing the message on. “Sure.”
“Thank you!”
Rumi nods. “So, who’s the kid?”
“Ah, Minami Daichi. His mom, Sakura, was in Natsuo’s year at college. They’ve been friends since they started. Natsuo was top of his class, but Minami had to attend a lot of tutorials so Natsuo offered to babysit Daichi for her since he had time. He’s Daichi’s second favourite person in the whole world, so he doesn’t mind babysitting whenever Minami needs some help.”
“Second favourite?”
“Kumi’s his favourite person in the whole world. He told me that five times on the way to the park.”
“Aww.”
“What about you? How’d you end up on babysitting duty?”
Rumi sighs. “Everyone in that house decided to simultaneously go on a date, Spinner had some kind of gaming tournament and Tenko got grounded so someone had to bring Kumi to meet her best friend. Hawks called me.”
“So, Hawks really is staying with them?”
“Believe me, I was very surprised to find that out.” Rumi glances at the two children on the swings, excitedly talking about something. She turns to face Fuyumi and smiles. “So, what was that about you being pink earlier?”
Fuyumi turns pink again and looks away. “Leave me alone. Not everyone gets to meet their celebrity crush.”
Rumi pretends to be hurt. “Damn, and here I thought you had a real crush on me.”
“What?” Fuyumi squeaks, staring at Rumi with wide eyes.
Rumi laughs. “You’re cute. I like you.”
Fuyumi claps her hands to her cheeks.
“Aww, you’re turning red!”
“I am not! You are!”
“I’m really not.”
“Shut up!”
Daichi suddenly screams and both women turn to see him fall off the swing. They’re off the bench and at the swings in an instant, but by the time they get there, Daichi is wiping his tears and nodding at Kumi.
“See,” Kumi says, “you’re all better now.”
“It’s only because Micchan is amazing.”
Kumi beams, puffing up like a proud bird. “I am pretty awesome.”
“I’m okay,” Daichi tells Fuyumi.
“Are you sure?” Fuyumi asks. “Where did you get hurt? Let me see.”
“I’m not hurt! I just got scared!”
“You’re a brave little kid,” Rumi says with a smile, “aren’t you?”
Daichi beams and giggles. “Only because I have Micchan!”
Kumi smiles and Rumi thinks she’s seen that look before, but she can’t quite place it.
“Is park time over?” Kumi asks, looking between the two adults.
“I took a day off work to look after you the whole day, so I don’t mind staying longer.” Rumi glances at Fuyumi. “Especially if the company is so sweet.”
Daichi yelps and ducks behind Kumi when Fuyumi flushes. “Yumi‘s sick! Yumi’s gonna make me sick!”
Kumi frowns at Daichi. “So? Your mom’s a doctor.”
Daichi rolls his eyes. “Mama’s busy, Micchan.”
“Fine. Then you can just stay with me.”
Daichi looks up at Kumi with sparkling eyes.
“No,” Fuyumi says. “I have to take you home to your mother when she’s done with work.”
Kumi and Daichi both huff.
“Wait, so can we keep playing?” Kumi asks. “We haven’t played see-saw yet.”
Rumi glances at Fuyumi, who nods. The two children race each other to the see-saw, arguing about who got there first.
“I suppose it’s a good thing Dusty McDustFace got himself grounded.”
Fuyumi frowns. “Hm? Why is that?”
Rumi leans towards her and grins. “I got to meet you.”
Fuyumi squeaks, flushing immediately. “You’re horrible. I hate you.”
“Your pink cheeks say otherwise.”
Fuyumi shoves Rumi lightly and marches back to the bench. Rumi follows, amused and a little smug.