Work Text:
The white lights overhead were starting to blind them. Inko Midoriya sat quietly in a hard plastic chair, fidgeting with her hands in her lap. Her emerald eyes stared ahead, looking blank and distant like she was in some other world. Beside her, her 17-year-old son Izuku shifted constantly, glancing at her once in a while with a worried expression on his face.
“You didn’t have to come with me,” Inko said. She sounded very tired. “I would’ve been fine by myself.”
It had taken everything in her strength to come here. Months of denial, grief, and nights spent crying until her voice was gone, until her eyes became so dry because there was no more tears left. She’d buried herself in anything that kept her from thinking of him. Just hearing his name used to send her into a breakdown. Izuku smiled. His mother was a lot more stronger now.
“I needed to,” Izuku replied. “I couldn’t let you go through this alone. And… I needed it for me too. To face it. You wouldn’t let anyone else come anyway.”
Inko tried to smile. “I didn’t want Toshinori to see me like this. Getting emotional again. I told him not to come.”
“He understands. All Might just wants you to be okay. But… you don’t have to hold it together right now. It’s the least you deserve.”
“I’ve been trying,” she said,. “Toshinori’s been so kind, he kept his promise to look after us. And I’m trying to move on. But to do that, I have to understand who he was. The man I thought I knew… for over twenty years.”
She reached out and took Izuku’s hand.
“I’m sorry.”
“Mom, you’ve been apologizing since the war ended. None of this is your fault. You didn’t know. He made sure of that.” Izuku smiled, “Even after all that, I’m grateful to be here, I’m glad I was born.”
A young officer came into the room.
“Mrs. Midoriya?” he calls.
She stands up slowly and Izuku clumsily walks beside her. They’re taken down a hallway into a small private room. A female officer with curled goat horns greets them. Another officer followed with a large sealed box in his arms. He sets it down with a large thud on the table between them.
“We’ve cleared everything,” the goat-horned officer explains. “Multiple safehouses, a few private penthouses. Most of it was destroyed but, this… is what was left.”
Inko stares at the box. Her hands are trembling but she hides them under the desk.
Izuku can feel the pit forming in his stomach, like something was pressing against his ribs. His mother isn’t crying, not yet, but she was clearly barely holding it together.
The officer opens the box. “You can keep whatever you want, if not we’ll be forced to throw it all out. We’ll leave you two to it”
Inside are neatly folded suits, elegant ties, blazers in muted grays and black. A stack of documents and a few expensive watches beside them, and on top a single silver wedding band.
This is all that was left of him.
Inko steps forward, feelings nauseated as her fingers touched the small cold metal. She picks it up carefully wondering why on earth he still kept it with the few possessions he had left.
“I should throw it all away,” she whispers. “Burn it. He’s gone and this ring was all a lie. He’s nothing but a passing memory now…” she sobs, “But I can’t.”
Izuku looks down. “I know. I feel the same way. He was a monster… but he raised me well with love. He laughed. He listened to me. He tucked me in at night and told me it was ok to be quirkless. And none of it makes any sense. He never gave any sign of… of what he was. I don’t understand.”
Inko sits down slowly. She holds one of the blazers in her arms, pressing it to her chest.
“I always had doubts. But nothing like this. I used to watch those crime shows and think, ‘How do you live with someone like that and not know?’ But here I am.”
Izuku reached into the box again and pulled out a stack of passports. Different names. Different faces. Different countries.
“There are at least ten identities here.” He paused, flipping open one. “This one is ‘Hisashi Midoriya.’”
He sighed. That was the name of the man who raised him, not the one he fought.
“I should’ve known,” Inko murmured. “No man goes on a ‘business trip’ and never comes back for seven years. He left me alone to raise a child and I still blindly followed. I waited. I listened to his calls. I was desperate I wanted him to come back so bad I let it consume me. He was a good husband, and until you got your quirk a good father.”
Izuku’s hands curl into fists.
“I’ll never understand why he did it. Why he looked me in the eye as a child and treated me so well, but as All for One he almost killed me. But he did he spare you, Mom. At least didn’t he use you to get to me. That has to mean something.”
Inko looked at him. Her eyes were wet now.
“We’ll never know. He’s dead. Whatever answers we wanted, they died with him. He was a stupid, selfish man. And I will always love him, even after everything he did.”
Izuku looks into the box again, then turns to her.
“Do you really want to keep some of it? It’s mostly fraudulent documents.”
Before she could answer, something buried in the blazer catches her eye. She reaches in and pulls out a small, weathered photograph.
Two boys.
The younger one, with long white hair, clutching a stuffed rabbit and smiling shyly. He’s wearing a shirt far too big for him. Behind him stands a taller boy with curly, messy hair and a white button up shirt. His face is stoic. Almost blank.
Inko’s hand covers her mouth. “Is that…?”;
Izuku leans closer.
“That must be Yoichi. The First User,” he smiled softly. “Even back then… he looked the same. And the one beside him is…”
“It must have been there first photo together.” Inko turns the photo around.
There, in careful handwriting, are the words:
She gasps almost falling over.
Zen and Yoichi Shigaraki
“Zen…” She was crying now. Tears streaming down her face freely.
“So you were Zen Shigaraki. Not Hisashi. Even until the end, you really did lie about everything, didn’t you?”
She clutches the photo to her chest, the wedding band still in her hand.
“Even your own name.”
Izuku places a hand on her back.
The man she thought she knew is gone. Or he never even existed in the first place.