Midoriya Haruto is the name engraved on the tombstone. The name of his wife, Midoriya Suzume, is engraved on it and painted in red, an indication of the still-living. And yet, Izuku hasn’t really seen much of her either, honestly. But he stands there on a bright Sunday afternoon, after his maternal grandmother and most of his aunts, uncles, and cousins have already visited. He can tell by the way the gravestone has already been washed, how there’s already a fresh set of flowers and peaches in front of the tombstone. Incense is already burning softly. And so, his mom puts down the pail of water and begins to pray, not using the water and ruining what has already been done.
Izuku stands beside his mom in prayer, wearing one of his school button-downs and jeans. Upon the end of the prayer, he watches his mom add the flowers she’s brought to the ones already there, carefully arranging them like she’s a florist. She sighs and straightens up when she’s done.
“Hello Dad,” his mom begins, and Izuku stays silent as she tells him about the past year. His eyes flit around to the other tombstones. Names flash past his vision as he stares at flowers and bees. Some tombstones are made from marble, others from lesser stones. A cat is eating fruit given to one person’s ancestors, and the cat’s kittens are gathered behind their mother. An elderly man is sharing a rice cake between himself and an old tombstone, and he laughs with it like it’s his old friend.
“Izuku is doing well, too. His grades are always improving! It’s only his first year of middle school, but I know he’s going to excel.”
There’s a butterfly fluttering around before it lands on a stone and rests, occasionally flapping it little blue wings in the wind. A little toddler is hugging a tombstone further down as a man stands behind her, his face a bit wet. A bird is building a nest near a smaller stone one, gathering little branches and moss to make its home.
“I really wish you could’ve met him, Dad. I mean...you did. Once. But I wish you...I wish you spent more time with us.”
Other names are painted in red on the tombstones. Spouses who have yet to pass away and join their loved ones. One of them is abandoned altogether. Had it not been for the funeral home, he’s certain spider webs would’ve already been set up around them. It’s off in a quiet corner, away from the sunlight. Abandoned by the living. Alone. All alone. All alone and by itself without anyone to wish their soul well…
He blinks, then turns his head towards his mom, who gazes at him with wet eyes, expectant. He glances quickly at his mom’s dad’s stone, then at her. She does it as well, nodding her head towards it.
He looks back at the stone. Well loved. Well cared for. The red name of a living spouse without any chipped paint. Perfectly done. Perfectly scented. The perfume of flowers and incense becomes suddenly cloying to him.
Izuku knows good and well his grave will never be like this.
“Hi. Uhm… Hope things are good over there.” He nods a bit and fiddles with his fingers. “I wish…”
Why did you abandon your daughter because of me? Why didn’t you want to see me? Why didn’t you love your daughter despite me? Why did you let me make Mom’s life worse? Why did you abandon us? Why?
Why am I here with you instead of with Tadao?
“...wish you well in the afterlife.”
Izuku wants to go back home.
Izuku has a quirk. He knows he does. He has a quirk, and it makes him unlucky.
Because of all the things to do, while walking through Northern Higashiyama, he finds himself knocking into his mother’s sisters. Three of the four of them, anyway.
“Oh my gawsh~! Look at you, baby boy! I haven’t seen you since you were thiiiiiiis little!” one of his aunts cheer, her green-tinted hair straight down her back unlike the style his mom puts hers in. She smiles, but it’s false. There’s a superior tilt to it, obviously in reference to her own son, his cousin, who is being greeted by his mom at that moment with kind smiles and genuine appreciation. “How old are you now? Ten? Nine?”
“Oh! I’m so sorry! You must’ve inherited your mom’s short genes, hahahaha!”
Her lips are painted red, the brightest of the sisters as they toddle around and coo at the little chicks they’ve all brought up. One of his aunts isn’t there, staying at his old grandmother’s side. So if his grandmother never meets him, by extension, anyone watching over her won’t see him. He finds himself wishing that all of his aunts were taking care of her.
“So, little mister, you just started junior high school, huh? How is that going? With a cute face like yours, I’m sure you have all the girls gaga over you!”
Izuku stares off to the side, wanting so badly to back up and just...walk back to Musutafu to see Tadao. He’d rather tell the baby boy about all the interesting things he’s seen at the graveyard than be here now.
“Oh come on, speak up clearly, won’t you? Your mother did say you had a mumbling habit. You need to speak clearly so people will understand what you’re saying!”
She smiles brightly, red lipstick stark against her pale face. “That’s better, that’s better. Now then, how about you, Yuji, Junpei, Kamiko, Souma, and Kawaru all play together for a while? I’m sure you guys will have a lot in common. My boy, Yuji, he’s a second year in junior high now! He’s in the basketball club, you know? Do you play any sports?”
He shakes his head, and his aunt frowns a little. “No ma’am.” The smile returns.
“Gosh, that’s such a shame. I bet you’d be good at sports...something like ping pong? Tennis, maybe? But, well, you’d have to beef up a bit, wouldn’t you? Maybe you could ask my boy Yuji for some tips, hmm? I’m sure he’d love to tell you how to...hmm...how do they say it now? ‘Get swole’? Yeah, that’s it! Hahahaha!”
Izuku smiles so tightly his lips curve in a bit. When his gaze leaves her to look past her, the boy who his mom has been talking to is nodding down at her. He’s taller, like Kacchan. His hair’s more green and much straighter than Izuku’s is, and he doesn’t have any freckles or pimples. His eyes are smaller than his own, so with that and his muscle, he looks older by a good three or four years instead of the one year difference between them. He’s an ikimen for sure. The name ‘Midoriya’ is a blessing wherever he goes.
And Izuku’s a loser who can’t become a hero. His one good feature is that he can somehow get Tadao to stop crying by being there with him.
He wants so badly to go back to the hospital.
“Are you in any clubs? You should join a club, even if it’s not for sports! Like painting or homemaking. Those aren’t very manly things, but you’d have some skill for it, I’m sure! Oh, but Inko says you’re a smart boy...you should be in the reading club! Or the science club! What do you think about those? You should join one of them!”
Izuku smiles. “I’ll think about it.”
Suddenly, his aunt gasps. “Oh goodness, here I am just talking your little ears off. Precious boy!” She grabs one of them and tugs a little like one would tug his cheeks, and he winces, resisting the urge to smack it off. Her touch feels...not that great. “Here, you know what? You should spend some time around people your own age. Let me get out of your hair, alright?” She turns around then. “Yuji! Why don’t you and your cousins spend some time around town while us ladies keep clucking on?”
Yuji turns away from his mom and nods. “Okay.”
He sounds more mature, too. His voice is deeper. How is it that a one-year difference has done such a thing?
A few moments and some cash exchanges, and the four sister Midoriyas are walking off, chatting amongst each other. He watches as his mother lags behind a step or two, not quite in the group though certainly among them. Sighing a little, he turns back towards the group of kids he’s been unfortunately grouped with.
Yuji isn’t actually the oldest, though he looks it. The oldest is Junpei, who’s already 14. He has straight hair like the others, short cut and more mature-looking. He wears glasses, too. Kamiko is 13, too, and she’s really pretty. She looks kind of like his mom when she was younger, before she began stress-eating from his quirklessness, and she wears a headband in her long hair, the tips touching the small of her back. Souma and Kawaru are younger than him—Souma’s born in August, and Kawaru’s 10. The two are siblings, Souma being the older brother with sharper eyes and a scar over his nose, and Kawaru somehow gaining a little curl to her short hair, some of it pulled into a ponytail on the side of her head.
The group of cousins chat amongst each other like they know each other well. They probably do. But Izuku, like his mom, stands a little further away and observes what’s around him. Watches them like he’s watching a TV show, trying to gage what they’re all feeling. But he does get a little distracted. Distracted enough that he doesn’t really realize when Souma’s walking up to him.
“Hey, my mom says you’re disabled. But you don’t look like it.” Souma crosses his arms, a frown on his face.
Izuku blinks for a moment at the slightly taller boy before what he said registers.
Souma opens his mouth to say something again, but suddenly, a slightly blue highlight of a hand appears and smacks him on the back of his head. Behind him, Kawaru’s face has flushed up, but it’s Kamiko’s hand that glows blue.
“Hey, don’t just say things like that! Are you stupid?” she hisses.
But Izuku’s not really paying attention to the insult anymore. He’s more focused on the quirk.
“Is that...is that your quirk?” Izuku asks, watching as the girl blinks at him. “It looks like a kind of telekinesis, but it’s more like projection.”
“Oh, yeah.” Kamiko smiles cutely and puts her hands into peace signs. They glow a little, and two hands show up at her sides, larger and glowing, making the same peace signs she is. “I can make a projection of my hands to move out at a distance from my body~ It’s really useful for picking up far away things, like the TV remote!”
The conversation seems to pick up from there, and Izuku moves in closer as his cousins start talking about their quirks.
Junpei’s quirk is more memory-based than physical. He can read a book and remember every word in it for up to 48 hours on one single read. After two reads, up to 96 hours, so on and so forth. Eventually, he just remembers the book entirely. It’s even more efficient for signs and maps, which are much shorter than books. He’s been top in his class since 1st grade and not a single person has been able to beat him since.
Yuji’s quirk is an attraction to objects, similar to his mom, but rather than just small things, after training his quirk, he can attract larger things. Nothing bigger than a mini-fridge though, or his head starts to hurt. He can also push things instead of only pulling them. Pulling and pushing a basketball during a casual game rather than one for his team is very fun to do, according to the guy. He also likes pulling on his girlfriend’s sweater from a distance to get her to come closer, which makes Izuku blush red while Souma calls him gross, a similar flush over his own cheeks.
Kamiko, of course, can project her hands and hit and grab things as need be. There’s a range where she can’t reach, but the closer she is, the faster the hands are. She showed off her particular skill by swiping a little kendama from an old woman’s little market store so quickly that no one but a camera would notice it. Even then, it would be blurry. After playing around with the toy, which made Kawaru rather silently distressed, she eventually put it back much to her own displeasure.
Souma’s quirk allows him to pull himself to objects or pull the objects to himself. Rather than being affected with a headache or a nosebleed by the weight of the object, the weight relative to himself and the object is what affects what happens. If he weighs less than the object, he’ll be pulled towards it. If he weighs more than the object, it’ll be pulled towards him. However, he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of it. In fact, the scar on his nose is from when he pulled on a lighter object a bit too quickly and broke his nose when it collided with his face.
Kawaru’s quirk almost seems to come out of nowhere. Rather than pulling or pushing or anything of that sort, her quirk is memory-based like Junpei’s...sort of. She can touch inanimate objects and see a brief history of the object or things that have happened near the object. However, for the moment, she can only look at an object’s history once. Once before, she used her quirk to figure out who stole some fundraising money by looking at the history of the desk the money had been placed in. She was able to identify the culprit by the feeling of the hand that reached in and took the money. Her school life, as it turns out, is a little turbulent because of that.
Izuku can relate, only, for a different reason. Which ends up rearing its ugly head when they ask what his quirk is.
“Oh...uhm...I’m actually...uh...quirkless.
There’s a sudden silence among the kids. A realization...no. A remembrance, like they had forgotten something and his statement suddenly flipped a switch.
Izuku feels himself start to sweat. “I-I mean, I just really like quirks, you know? I think they’re really interesting, so I’m always...well...studying them. I guess.”
The warm atmosphere becomes colder. Eyes begin to avert from his body. He sees a slight smirk on Yuji’s face before it quickly clears off, and Junpei’s glasses seem almost to cloud over. Kamiko’s smile becomes pointedly pitying in a way that he really, really hates.
“Oooooh...that’s what Mom meant by you being disabled,” Souma says, eyes wide.
He gets another smack to the head, but it’s less harsh.
As they keep walking on down the stairs at one of the more populated areas, lanterns on and people shopping, the group begins to separate from him. Their steps become a little faster, they ask them fewer questions, and their group seems to close in. Though Kawaru sends him occasional, sympathetic glances, peer pressure wins out and she abandons him like the rest of them do.
Eventually, two people could fit between the distance they’ve built away from each other, like they’re a happy group and he’s their freckled, curly-haired stalker.
Well...Izuku went into this expecting something like this to happen, but it hurts no less. In fact, knowing that they’re family, that they are likable, that they could’ve been friends...it makes it hurt even more than being abandoned by everyone at school and in their neighborhood.
It’s not fair. But nothing is.
So Izuku decides that, if he’s going to be dragged around like the ball at the end of a chain for the rest of the day, he’s going to do it doing things he enjoys. So he takes out his phone and turns on the camera setting, and he starts taking pictures.
A lantern glows before evening at a storefront, hanging from the roof of an old Heian-styled building made of wood. A window of one of the shops has a lot of little glass figurines that glimmer from the white Christmas light display they have around it and little golden lucky cats that wave their paws to invite luck. An older woman fans herself as she wears a kimono, sitting on a bench as she calmly eats her mochi. Crows land on a fence and caw at each other, having gathered in a solid murder, eyeing a nearby tempura place where enough customers have given them treats that they wait to eat.
He nearly takes a picture of Kamiko’s face, but stops before his finger hits the button.
“Uhm...what is it?” he asks. A quick glance up shows the others waiting, antsy and curious.
“We’re going to this shrine we like to visit. Keep up, okay?”
Izuku nods. “Yeah, okay.”
She smiles, satisfied, and turns around as she rejoins the group. Surprisingly, he’s grown even further apart from them, so he speeds up a little to make sure he’s closer.
He catches the word “weirdo”, and decides a solid two-people distance from the group is good enough.
With his phone still out, he sends a quick text to his mom.
[I’m tired. Can we go back to the hotel yet?]
She responds faster than he would’ve expected had she been talking with her sisters.
[Not yet, sweetie. Just have a little fun with your cousins, okay?]
