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There is a convenience store right down the street from the hospital where everyone’s child but hers is being treated.
Mitsuki walks there with her head ducked, her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket. She shoulders the door open.
Her and Masuru had gotten to the hospital in a blur — she doesn’t remember much after the initial phone call. They’d stumbled inside, ready to tear to Katsuki’s bedside, and are met with his homeroom teacher instead.
That had been 12 hours ago. Mitsuki hasn’t slept, and hasn’t gone home. The bright colors of the convenience store feel wrong. There’s a TV in the corner, blaring. She doesn’t look at it.
She grabs a lighter off the display, slams it on the counter, and asks for a pack of cigarettes.
Now, she is huddled in an alleyway, in front of a side service-entrance to the hospital, sitting hunched over on the concrete steps. She rips the box open.
Mitsuki clamps her teeth around a cigarette, almost tight enough to bite through it. Fingers shaking, she fumbles the lighter — once, twice, a third time. She curses, low and vicious.
Then the lighter flies out of her hand.
Misuki’s head snaps up, following its trajectory.
Several feet away stands Midoriya Inko, feet planted, hand extended, lighter summoned to her palm by her Quirk. She flips it over and examines it. It’s a cheap thing, plastic, patterned with a popular manga character.
She looks up at Mitsuki, who still has the smoke between her lips. “I thought you quit,” she says, voice light and lacking judgment.
“I did,” rasps Miksuki. “I quit when Katsu —” her voice breaks around her son’s name, and she takes a shuddering inhale, “— when my kid was 8. But I am kinda fucking stressed right now, and I need something to stop me from losing my damn mind.”
Inko’s lip trembles. “Fair enough,” she says, her voice still forced into something casual. She walks over and sits on the steps next to Mitsuki.
Inko ignites the lighter and holds it out. Mitsuki stares at her for a long beat, and then snorts. She leans in, lights her cigarette, and inhales.
They sit there a moment, Inko’s hands clutched on her knees, Mitsuki drawing deeply on the cigarette.
Mitsuki exhales a cloud of smoke. Her fingers tremble. Without looking at Inko, she says, “Are you also here to tell me what a terrible fuckin’ mother I am?”
Inko’s face crumples. “Mitsuki—”
“C’mon, Midoriya, tell me. Let me have it. You know you want to, I bet you’ve been waiting to do it for years.” Her lip curls up into a mean little snarl, eyes wild. “Tell me I raised a bully and a brute and a cruel little bastard who deserves everything that’s coming to him. And he takes after me, haven’t you noticed? Think you’ll be the first one to say it? Ever single time we see Masaru’s fuckin’ mother, I have to hear it — ‘such a shame he takes after your bitch of a wife.’ As if that’s the worst fucking thing in the world. God forbid my son be like me.” She grinds the butt of the cigarette into the concrete step next to her, and then keeps pushing until it’s flat. She stares at the tiny pile of paper and ash. “Go on, Inko.” Mitsuki’s voice has also gone flat, hollow. “I know what he did to Izuku.”
Inko’s Izuku, who is ripped to shreds in a hospital bed, an inch away from a medically-induced coma. Inko’s Izuku, who is in the hospital. Inko’s Izuku, her entire world, who is alive in the hospital and has not been kidnapped by who-knows-who to do who-knows-what.
“Just tell me it’s my fault and get it over with.” And then Mitsuki sits there and waits for it, the sharp indictment, the angry words. She can’t comprehend how anything else could be coming.
A soft hand falls onto her shoulder. She turns to look at it, and then up into Inko’s face, which is set and firm.
“I would never say something like that to you,” says Inko, “and neither should anyone else.”
Mitsuki stares at her. Can see, in her mind’s eye, a little green head poking out from cold white hospital sheets. More bandages than boy.
Inko stares back. Tears are gathering on the edges of her eyes. “Mitsuki, are you alright?” Inko asks wetly.
“I —” Mitsuki’s hands twitch. She crushes the carton between them. The skin on her face feels tight. “I can’t stay in there anymore. I can’t be with Masuru. Whatever he needs right now, I can’t give it to him — what a shock, right? Me, not being comforting. Never fucking soft enough.” She snorts. As if Inko, with her perfect homemaker disposition, could ever relate to that. “I can’t look at my phone. I can’t turn on the TV. I can’t listen to what every single asshole with an internet connection is saying — is saying about —”
And it hits her, then, like a fist to the throat. A hundred thousand joyful moments turned into knives. Putting an All Might bandage on his tiny little knee while he screwed his face up, so determined to be brave. Slamming a perfect test on the kitchen table in front of her, smirking his victory. Dozing off next to Masuru on the couch. How perfectly he’d fit in the notch of her chest, when his palms were the size of 500 yen coins.
Hers. Hers, the way nothing else in this world is. Her kid, her son, her —
“My baby.” The words rip their way out of her without her consent. Her eyes burn. “Inko, Inko, my baby. What are they doing to him?”
Her voice is unrecognizable, even to her. She sounds like a wire about to snap. She is keening.
Mitsuki doesn’t think she’s made a sound like that since the first time anyone ever told her to shut the fuck up, age 5. And she never did listen, after that first time.
Inko grips her shoulder a little bit harder.
“Why him? Why my fucking kid? Everyone else’s kid made it back except for mine. Why do they want him, what if they’re hurting him? It’s not fair, it’s not fair — Katsuki, oh, Katsuki.”
And, fuck her, now she’s crying.
“I know, Mitsuki,” says Inko.
“I know you know,” she spits. “Fuck, your kid looks like he got chewed up and spit out. Or, no, wait —” she feels Inko flinch next to her, and then Mitsuki flinches herself. “Sorry, fuck, sorry. I’m so bad at this. I’m so damn bad at this.”
Inko sighs. She places the heels of her hands into her eyes and presses. “It’s alright. I-It’s okay.”
They fall into silence again. Mitsuki thumbs another cigarette out of the carton and holds it between her fingers. She doesn’t reach for the lighter.
“I know I fucked up with him.” She speaks to the cigarette. “I fucked up with him the same way everyone always said I was going to. I’m not soft enough. No maternal influence. I should have left my day job and just been a fucking mother. I should have taught him humility but I passed on my damn pride and my big mouth instead.”
She flips the cigarette over her fingers. Catches it in her palm.
“I just wanted him to grow up hearing that he’s worth something.” Next to her, Mitsuki hears Inko’s breath catch and wheeze. Mitsuki continues, “I wanted him to hear that he’s worth everything, every single part of him. Wouldn’t that have made all the difference to you, growing up? If one fucking person told you that you were worth everything the world has to offer? More than a pretty face, or a means to an end, or a way for other people to feel good. Don’t shrink yourself. Take up as much space as you need. That’s all I’ve ever wanted him to have. And I fucked him up.”
And now he might be gone forever, remains unsaid.
And now I might never have a chance to fix it, remains unsaid.
I don’t know what I’m going to do if my baby is dead, remains unsaid.
Before Mitsuki stormed out for cigarettes, a beat cop had spoken of her son in the past tense. “He had such a promising career ahead of him.”
Masuru had to physically hold her back from murdering the fucker where he stood.
It’s all swirling, swirling in her mind — his first steps, his first word, the first time he hurt himself with his Quirk and they all pretended he didn’t cry about it. ‘Of course I’m amazing, I have the best mom in the world!’
He could be hurting. They could be beating him, or starving him, or worse. He must be so scared.
His warm, soft weight in her arms. High, reedy cries like a kitten. Hi there. Hi, baby. Mama’s been waitin’ for you.
Her Katsuki could be dead.
Inko doesn’t offer any platitudes or empty reassurances. She doesn’t tell Mitsuki that the heroes will get her son back. She just says, “I think that, if you’re a bad mother, then I’m the worst mother in the world.”
Mitsuki shakes her head, scrubbing her tears away as she does. She thinks about Izuku, in the hospital where Katsuki is not, his arms barely saved. Remembers the same arms covered in paint and presenting her macaroni art.
“They’ve always caused us so much fucking trouble,” says Mitsuki, voice thick. She places her second cigarette between her teeth.
Inko ignites the lighter again without having to be asked. The flame flickers between them, warm and bright. Alive and pulsing. As cruel and as comforting as hope, or as love, or as her son’s perfect, sparking Quirk.
Mitsuki lights it, and inhales.