Archive of Our Own ^beta

Hitoshi’s graduation day was bright and cold. Cherry blossom season had come early and he couldn’t have asked for better conditions for commemorative photos. 

Most of the UA students were dressed in their uniforms with the exception of the Heroics department, who stood in the grand assembly wearing the final version of their hero costumes; perfected over the course of three years of instruction and experimentation.

Hitoshi’s costume still contained a nod to his mentor, Eraserhead, but he’d refined it over time; adding sleek body armor with violet accents that matched his voice modulator and his own set of capture scarves made in a matte charcoal gray rather than Aizawa-sensei’s brilliant white. Hatsume had added a polarized screen to cover his eyes when they realized the pale band of his face over his mask was just as noticable in the dark as white scarves. 

Hatsume, being Hatsume, had gone ten steps further and added an integrated computer and communications to his armor. She’d also turned the screen into a head’s up display. The suit itself had a passive espionage suite that he was taking full advantage of to get seamless footage of the entire ceremony.

He got it all; every speech and presentation. At the end he felt dizzy with the impact of his success as he held his diploma in one hand and his upgraded license in the other. He was a Pro Hero .

“CONGRATULATIONS!” Present Mic swept him up in a hug as soon as Hitoshi cleared out of the auditorium. “We’re so proud of you.”

Hitoshi’s mask hid his silly grin, but Mic was a veteran hero and knew to look at his eyes for the telltale crinkle. “Thanks.” He said softly and looked over Mic’s shoulder just in time to see Eraserhead’s more sedate approach.

His mentor looked softer than he ever had with a persistent little smile clinging to the edges of his mouth. Hitoshi had the privilege of knowing that Aizawa was always a little fond and wistful during the UA graduation ceremony as he sent another class of new heroes out into the world. This year would be the first in a while that he had an intact homeroom class graduate, but Hitoshi wanted to believe that smile was all for him. Maybe it was, after all he was the one who got to see it. Aizawa had kept his mouth hidden behind his scarves for the ceremony and hadn’t emerged anywhere a student could get their feelings on him until that moment.

Aizawa offered his hand for a shake, which Hitoshi accepted with the same gravity. 

“You did good.” His voice was quiet, but sincere. “I’m honored to have been your teacher.”

That was too much and even Hitoshi’s calcified heart started to melt. “I couldn’t have done it without you.” He confessed. “I was determined, but I didn’t…” His voice failed on him. “Thank you.” He tried again and bowed low. “I’m so grateful to have been your student.”

The gravity of the moment shattered when Mic’s phone made a loud shutter noise. It made another when both Hitoshi and Aizawa turned their heads to glare at him at the same time.

“Okay!” Mic cheered and pumped his fist in the air. “Now for a group selfie under the cherry blossoms then we’re getting pictures in front of the ceremony sign!”

A little message alert appeared in the corner of his HUD forwarded from his phone, but Hitoshi had turned off push notifications for the ceremony. However, he could still see the sender’s identity and the message was from his mother. 

‘Might as well rip off the bandage…’ He thought and blinked at the icon to open the message while Mic hauled them both off for photographs. It was pretty much what he’d been expecting and he blinked twice to dismiss it without answering. 

Mic wasn’t satisfied with just the group selfie and the traditional picture in front of UA’s flower-trimmed graduation ceremony sign. He also wanted a picture of Hitoshi and Aizawa with UA’s building in the distance. He had to lay on the floor to get the angle he wanted, but dignity did not often stand between Yamada Hizashi and a good pic. 

Then Uraraka found him and hauled him away for more pictures with the nerdier side of class 3-A, which Mic also volunteered to take. He took more photos of Hitoshi with Monoma, Kendo, and the other friends he’d made in 3-B.

He came away from the ceremony with enough pictures to publish a photobook and no reassurances that Mic wasn’t planning to do just that. He left campus walking companionably in between his two former teachers. They had all changed into civilian drag and Hitoshi carried his suit in a discreet duffle bag, a far cry from the distinctive school-issued briefcases they’d been required to use before. 

“We should go somewhere to celebrate!” Mic decided out loud as they walked. “I’m thinking sushi -- oh , or teppanyaki. I saw a place advertising uni cresson. Now that’s special occasion food.”

“Are your parents expecting you tonight?” Aizawa’s tone was deceptively mild. He knew that was a loaded question and had likely anticipated the answer he was about to get.

“No.” Hitoshi sighed. He might as well get it over with. “I got a text from mom after the ceremony; congratulations and a reminder that I need to have my stuff out of the house by Friday.”

“Ah.” Aizawa shoulders lifted up just enough that his off-duty scarf hid his unhappy grimace. Hitoshi’s parent’s behavior wasn’t really a shock to anyone by that point, but his teachers always seemed to hope for reconciliation. Hitoshi could have told them they were just setting themselves up for disappointment, but that level of pessimism from a teenager just upset them more so he kept it to himself. 

“You’ll come stay with us in that case.” Aizawa said instead of any number of other justified things.

“Do you have much stuff left over there?” Mic asked. 

The fact of the matter was that Hitoshi had not lived ‘at home’ since shortly before UA had opened the dormitories. He hadn’t even gone home for the breaks. Mic and Aizawa were more than his teachers. They’d given him a room in their home for whenever he needed it, which had been most nights when he couldn’t stay at school or with his boyfriend.

“Not a lot, I don’t think.” Hitoshi thought about it, but drew a blank. His parents wouldn’t throw anything out until after the Friday deadline. They were fair in their own bloodless way. 

‘Izu would know.’ Hitoshi realized and got his phone out to shoot him a quick text. Izuku hadn’t been able to attend Hitoshi’s graduation ceremony, although they’d both wanted him to be there. Unfortunately, Izuku didn’t get to choose his hours and had to jump when work came available --although not for much longer if Hitoshi got his way. 

As much as he wanted to stay with Mic and Aizawa to explore what their little found family would look like without the barrier of school in the way, he also wanted to make it so that his boyfriend of two years didn’t have to work every single hour of the day just to make ends meet.

“Let’s drop your suit off at the house and then go get food.” Aizawa suggested. “Is there anyone you’d like to invite?”

“No one who’s available yet. Someone might join us later.” Hitoshi sighed. Izuku had said he was going to try and get out in time to do dinner or maybe go dancing, but he hadn’t known how long his gig would run. That was par for the course when you had ten million shitty part time gigs. Maybe once Hitoshi was making money they could cut him down to one or two less shitty part time jobs and tell the rest of his bosses to go to hell. 

Ideally he’d like Izuku to find one good full time job, but that wasn’t really achievable for a quirkless teenager with no highschool diploma.     

“ Someone , huh?” Mic grinned and waggled his eyebrows. 

Hitoshi’s ears went hot and he hunkered in on himself, which was the most incriminating response imaginable. 

Fortunately, Mic wasn’t mean and they were almost to the house since Mic and Aizawa lived close to campus. “Well, I hope they get free in time to catch up with us.” He clapped Hitoshi on the back and went ahead to unlock the door. 

Aizawa waited until Mic was just out of range. “I hope you know you can introduce us to anyone you’re seeing.” He said, voice pitched low. “If you’re at that point.” He added.

Hitoshi tried to play it cool, but his voice cracked when he replied; “I, yeah. We are. I want you guys to meet him.”

If he was at all surprised by the ‘him’ Aizawa didn’t let on even though they’d never had cause to discuss Hitoshi’s personal preferences. He’d have to be a hypocrite to be upset over that considering the fact that he’d been with Mic since they were teenagers. 

Hitoshi was more than ready to introduce Izuku to his fa --to Mic and Aizawa. The problem was that he wasn’t sure if he was ready to introduce them to Izuku.  

Quirkless people hadn’t really been on Hitoshi’s radar until the first time Izuku had to change addresses because his landlord found out that he was one. Since then he’d been there to see his boyfriend lose at least two of his ten million jobs and several casual friends for the same reason. 

Hitoshi had learned the hard way as a kid that prejudice didn’t have just one face and sometimes it belonged to someone you’d trusted. His teachers didn’t hate Hitoshi for a quirk he hadn’t chosen, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t surprise him over his lover’s lack of one and Hitoshi just hadn’t been brave enough to find out. 

Aizawa and Mic were under the impression that Hitoshi spent a lot more of his breaks with his biological parents than he really did. If he wasn’t in the dorms or in his room at the Yamada-Aizawa residence then he was at Izuku’s tiny studio apartment. 

Hitoshi trotted upstairs to the little bedroom he’d called home for almost every long break and summer since he turned sixteen. Most of his worldly belongings really were there already; his framed and signed band posters, his achievement certificates, his corkboard of pictures, all his clothes, his training gear, and his small collection of ultra rare limited edition Present Mic merchandise courtesy of the man himself. What else did he need?

As if summoned, his phone pinged with Izuku’s custom notification; All Might’s voice saying ‘I AM HERE!’ 

It was a response to his question.

Izu: Real quick because I’m on break; make sure to get your national insurance card if you don’t have it already.

Hitoshi smacked himself in the face. Obvious . He did not have it since he’d had UA’s campus clinic to go to when he was sick, but not every agency had an on-site medic or let their staff come in for normal preventative care or emergent health situations. Plus he didn’t have a job yet so he needed to be able to go to the free public clinics until he had other, more private options.

His phone lit up with another text.

Izu: Also baby pictures. Anything you want to keep that was yours like a stuffed animal or a baby blanket.

Hitoshi sat down on his bed. “Ah, Izu.” He muttered and covered his mouth as he wrestled with his inconvenient feelings. It was nice, on the one hand, to have someone who knew what he was going through. On the other, it meant that someone he cared for had had to go through it too.

“Everything ok in there?” Mic stuck his head in the door and frowned when he looked at Hitoshi’s face.

“Yeah, just got some good advice about the home situation and I kinda hate the fact he knows what to do.” Hitoshi rubbed his face. “Let me change.”

“Yeah?” Mic leaned against the doorframe. “Your friend… is he okay?”

That tone was not ‘Yamada, vaguely goofy parental figure’ that was ‘Present Mic, concerned teacher and Pro Hero.’ The two were very different in terms of intensity.

“Yeah, he’s okay now.” Hitoshi admitted, although he did not have all the details. Izuku rarely had the chill necessary to discuss his estranged mother although he had tried on more than one occasion. What few details Hitoshi had painted a very complicated picture. Izuku hadn’t gotten to go to highschool, for one. Hitoshi was pretty sure there’d been a brief period of homelessness in there too, although Izuku went to great lengths to talk around it. “He went through something similar a few years ago is all.” 

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Mic was sincere. “You sure he can’t join us?”

“No, he’s working. He said he was on break just now so it might be another few hours before they turn him loose.” Hitoshi dug through his closet as he explained, looking for something nice enough to wear out with his teachers that was also attractive enough to lure his significant other out on a late night date --and maybe more.

He held up a shirt for Mic’s inspection. “Yeah or nah?”

Mic considered it. “For being seen with some old people or for impressing a young man?” He asked.

“Why can’t it be both?” Hitoshi’s ears were hot again and Mic laughed at him while shouldering him out of the way.

“You can do better than that. Where are those black jeans?” Mic frequently knew the contents of everyone’s closets better than they themselves did. He picked out a pair of artistically slashed dark jeans he’d gotten as seasonal remainders from Best Jeanist’s fashion house the year before, a slouchy zip front shirt, and a long black jacket. “Try those with your foldover boots and that vertical bar necklace Nemu gave you.” 

Hitoshi squinted at the shirt and jacket. Then he looked at Mic. “Did I always have these?”

“Eh, I got some more samples the other day and they were your size.” Mic waved a flippant hand like people just gave him designer clothes all the time, which they did but not in Hitoshi’s size. What had likely happened in reality was more like Mic went shopping, got carried away, and came home with clothes for more than just himself. He’d given up on dressing Aizawa in anything other than black v-necks and slacks and had moved on to Hitoshi as a softer target. 

He didn’t often say no to free clothes, but it was a little unnerving when they just showed up in his closet and Mic pretended they’d been there the entire time.

Mic stood in the hall while Hitoshi changed and stuck his head back in when invited. “Leave the top zipped while we’re in the restaurant.” He made a thoughtful little tut-tut noise and then winked. “Unzip it a little before you see your boy so it frames the necklace.”

Hitoshi tried it out and… huh. The guy in the mirror looked, well, like Hitoshi only a little better; more accessible. The unzipped shirt showed off a subtle vee of skin that took the whole effect from a G rating to ‘I would like to take our relationship to the next stage’, which was what Hitoshi tentatively hoped would happen later that evening. He zipped the shirt back up fast before he could start thinking about it.

Aizawa gave him a surprised once over when Mic and Hitoshi joined him downstairs, but did not comment and Hitoshi was grateful because he would have died .

They walked to the teppanyaki joint, which was a small semi-open air bar not too far from the house. They took seats at the bar and let Mic do the ordering. Hitoshi ended up with tea while Mic and Aizawa shared a hot sake.

“In a few years you’ll be drinking with us.” Mic predicted.

“Maybe.” Hitoshi didn’t expect that he’d suddenly start liking alcohol in the next year or so, but weirder things had happened. “Or maybe I’ll keep being your sober friend. Someone has to take pictures when you do dumb stuff.”

As was usual, Aizawa changed the subject from drinking with brutal serenity. “How is the job hunt going?”

They both ignored Mic’s complaint of ‘aw, Shouta, no, boring!’

“I have some interviews scheduled.” Hitoshi admitted. “I have one recruitment offer, but I haven’t met with the supervising hero yet.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mic perked up. Guess they weren’t that boring. “With who?”

“The agency is called Watchtower.” Hitoshi didn’t know much about them just that they were small and newish. 

“Watchtower?” Aizawa frowned and got out his phone to check HeroNet. He found what he was looking for fairly fast and made an unimpressed face at his phone. “They’re a paper agency. No.”

“They sound familiar though.” Mic crossed his arms and rocked from side to side on his stool as he thought about it. “Oh, yeah. They broke into the Musutafu top fifty this year and it’s only been a few years since they opened. That explains why they’re recruiting.”

“What’s a paper agency?” Hitoshi was pretty sure he would have remembered the term if he’d heard it before.

“They don’t have a physical office.” Mic made a sketchy gesture. “Usually paper agencies belong to lower-ranked heroes who don’t have much financial backing; people trying to avoid startup debt, basically. Sometimes they’re shadow departments of established agencies; intelligence and recon, stuff like that.”

Hitoshi got his phone out to review his recruitment offer. “Uh, there’s a physical address on my invitation.” It was in a pretty rough area of town, which he did not mention. He hadn’t gone into Heroics to be safe, but Mic and Aizawa would be more worried about the trajectory of his career.

“Well, if they’re doing well they might have gotten a grant to establish a patrolling territory. The Mayor will do that sometimes to encourage new talent and stabilize parts of the city. That’ll usually include a budget for facilities. That way even if the agency goes under, there’s a building they can slot a new team into right away.” Mic shrugged. “Are they looking for sidekicks?”

“I think so, but I was offered a junior combatant role.” Hitoshi tucked the memory of Mic’s low, impressed whistle and Aizawa’s brief impressed nod away for later. “The recruiting officer said he’d explain more in person.”

“That’s not bad, Sho.” Mic murmured to Aizawa. “Watchtower has been getting some good media coverage too. Now that I’m thinking about it, they were the ones partnered with Selkie’s agency in that big smuggling sting operation last April.”

“It’ll depend on how much media coverage you want.” Aizawa acknowledged Mic with a nod. “You’re wanting to stay semi-underground still, yes?”

“I have to.” Hitoshi wanted to preserve the advantage of his quirk for as long as possible. Stealth and intelligence agencies didn’t often recruit out of highschools, unless they were hiring people like Mirio-senpai who was a protege of the agency’s lead hero. Unlike some heroes, he probably wouldn’t be able to stay at one agency for his whole career either. 

“Keep that in mind when you talk to the recruiter and remember what we told you about starting wages for new heroes. A junior combatant makes twice what a patrolling sidekick can expect. Don’t let them lowball you.”

Hitoshi laughed. “Oh, so you like them now?”

“Starting out as a JC looks good on paper.” Aizawa admitted. “Just make sure to meet everyone and get a feel for them before you make any decisions. Who’s your recruiting hero?”

“Red Tower.” Hitoshi blinked at the sudden frigid expression of appalled disgust on his mentor’s face. He looked around to make sure Ms Joke hadn’t just walked into the restaurant. “What?”

Mic burst out laughing. “Not all heroes get along.” He snorted and reached over to pat Aizawa on the back. “Red Tower is a former vigilante who went Underground Pro. No one ever officially caught him so there was nothing to stop him. I’m not surprised he went mainstream. He’s got a flashy quirk and a lot of experience although he is a bit old for it. It takes a while to really establish an agency. I wonder if he’s slowing down?”

“That jackass?” Aizawa grumbled. “Never.”

“Should I be worried?” Hitoshi did not want to have to be worried. 

“Nah.” Mic waved the question off. “Tower is unorthodox is all. So he’s the founding hero of Watchtower?”

He shook his head. “There’s two. Red Tower and Watchman, but I haven’t spoken to them.”

“Watchman… I don’t know that name. Must be the quiet type.” Mic poked around on his phone, presumably on Hero Net. “Might be good for you though if they’re used to letting Tower draw all the media fire while others work in the background. That's a good way to get started as long as the agency accurately reports your takedowns.”

Hitoshi’s back pocket announced ‘I AM HERE!’ and he hurried to check it. Sure enough, it was Izuku. 

Izu: I got free! Do you still want to meet up?

He wet his lips and looked over at Mic and Aizawa. They hadn’t even ordered their food yet, just drinks. 

Hitoshi: I’m with Mic and Aizawa. Do you want to meet them?

Izuku took a while to answer, but when he did…

Izu: Yes. Yes, I want to.

Hitoshi felt his whole body relax in relief. If Izuku wanted to come then it wouldn’t be bad , right?  

Then, in typical Izuku fashion, the fretting started up.

Izu: Is it fancy? 

Izu: OMG I’m just in my normal clothes. 

Izu: It’s your graduation party! Of course it’s fancy! 

Izu: Should I change?

Izu: I can change right now!

Hitoshi told him they were at a snack bar so casual was fine, shared his location and got a smiley face back in response with Izuku’s ETA. He blinked at the estimate. They’d gotten lucky and his gig had been nearby or Izuku had already been headed towards the bar district near UA when he’d texted. 

“Hey, uh…” Hitoshi’s face started to heat up again when he realized both his teachers were watching him with expectation. “My friend. He got free and um, I asked him to join us? If that’s okay?”

Inwardly, he groaned. Very smooth, Hitoshi. Good job.

Mic broke out in a grin. “Do I get to ask questions now?” He pleaded. “Because I have been VERY good for an entire hour and it might actually be killing me.”

“I, uh… yeah. Ask away.” Hitoshi fiddled with the zip on his shirt.

He hadn’t been this nervous the time Izuku had met his actual parents. Granted, those circumstances had been very different.  

“What’s his name?” Aizawa stole a march on Mic, who clutched his heart and went off about foul betrayal. “How did you two meet?”

“Midoriya Izuku.” Hitoshi didn’t really want to explain how they got together because they’d met in the uncomfortable window between Hitoshi having a place with them and the point where he just could not spend another minute locked in a house with his parents without somebody getting hurt. 

He’d tried to sleep on a park bench once only to get nearly mugged. The only reason he didn’t was because Izuku’s route home took him past the park where Hitoshi had tried to spend the night. He heard the noise and clobbered one of the guys with his loaded backpack. The muggers ran off and Izuku had offered to walk Hitoshi to an all night diner. He’d bought them both melon floats and Izuku had stayed to talk until Hitoshi was calm again. 

“We met in Bespin park and got to talking. Izu’s a huge quirk nerd and offered to help me workshop ideas for my second year support gear. Then we, uh, kept talking…”

Hitoshi rubbed the back of his neck, embarrassed just to think about the excuses he’d come up with to keep their conversations going until Izuku got brave and asked if he wanted to go out rather than just hang out.

It wasn’t until they’d been together for a while that Hitoshi realized how just hard Izuku had to work to carve out the time they’d been spending together. No one had ever done that; prioritized Hitoshi over his own needs and not because he felt obligated to, but because he’d wanted to. That was when Hitoshi had realized just how much trouble he was in; the forever kind of trouble.

“When was that?” Mic elbowed his partner before Aizawa could interrupt him. “How long have you two been together?”

Hitoshi thought about it. “It was the summer before second year so it’ll be two years soon.” 

That sat Mic back. “Really?” He blinked and seemed almost ---hurt? Maybe? “We’re only hearing about him now?” Oh, he was definitely hurt. He flinched when Aizawa elbowed him right back with a frown.

“Ah…” Hitoshi considered his former teachers. They didn’t really have an easily labelled relationship now that school was over for him, although from something his mother had once said Hitoshi suspected that Aizawa had once tried to forcibly take full custody of him away from his parents. It hadn’t worked, but his parents also hadn’t ever asked where he was living if not with them. There was a good chance they didn’t care so long as he kept up with school and Hitoshi had never wanted to find out for sure. 

Mic and Aizawa were better guardians than his genetic donors. They had never lied to him or made him feel unwanted. They deserved being given the benefit of the doubt.

“Izu is… look, I’m going to ask now before he gets here so we’re on the same page. Do you have any problems with quirkless people?”

Their response was gratifying in the genuine immediateness of it.

“Ah.” Aizawa echoed him, but in a more grave tone of understanding. “ No. We don’t.”

“Aw, kiddo, no.” Mic hastened to add. “Were you worried?”

“I wasn’t worried.” Hitoshi fought valiantly to keep his shoulders from hunching up in the lie and only really sorta succeeded. “Not really.”

“No, I get it.” Mic reached over to squeeze Hitoshi’s shoulder. “People can surprise you. Is he okay talking about it or do we leave quirks out of conversation?”

“Oh no, he loves talking about quirks.” Hitoshi huffed a short laugh just thinking about it. “He thinks everyone is wonderful and amazing. He’ll say it to your face too. I introduced him to some of the 1-B kids once and now I’m pretty sure Monoma would kill for him. It’s Izu’s superpower.”

Everyone who went into Heroics was just a little starved for attention; some more than others and Izuku’s brand of starry-eyed rapture upon hearing about a new quirk and all its potential applications was the purest drug Hitoshi could imagine. It didn’t work on everyone, obviously, or Izu’s life would have been a lot easier.

Monoma, though, he didn’t make friends easily. He and Hitoshi had sort of fallen into friendship because they were both the same kind of asshole and Hitoshi had smarted off to the 1-A kids before getting slotted into their class, but Izuku had had the benefit of not being a threat the way their classmates were so he hadn’t had to work around the barrier of Monoma’s knee jerk posturing. 

“Ah, Toshi? Is that you?”

Hitoshi turned around just in time to see the boy in question silhouetted against the setting sun as he ducked under the noren. Izuku wasn’t dressed nearly as casually as he’d implied. Hitoshi had seen what Izuku considered street clothes. He had on a plain navy polo shirt, a messenger bag, his compression sleeve, and cargo pants; not a hint of hero merch anywhere. 

Hitoshi patted the open stool next to him. “We’re here. What do you want to drink?”

Izuku beamed and slipped an arm around Hitoshi’s waist as he sat down. “Congratulations on graduating.” He gave Hitoshi a squeeze that Hitoshi returned and added to the man behind the grill, who was waiting with a pad of paper. “Tea, please.”

“These are my teachers.” Hitoshi leaned back so Izuku could see the men in question. “Aizawa Shouta and Yamada Hizashi.”

“Midoriya Izuku.” He bobbed a little seated bow, which the older men returned. “I’m really glad to meet you. Hitoshi talks about you all the time.”

It was the exact right thing to say. Mic beamed. Even Aizawa softened up a little. 

“You can call me Mic.” Mic pointed at the menu board. “Get whatever you like. It’s our treat tonight.”

“Thank you!” Izuku nudged Hitoshi with his shoulder. “How was the ceremony? I want to hear everything. Did the Hero department wear their costumes? Who gave the speeches? Did Neito cry?”

“I took a video on my body cam. We can watch it later when I download it from Hatsume’s server. Be patient. I got you Monoma ugly crying during the Principal’s speech in high definition.” Hitoshi squeezed Izuku’s shoulders when he puffed his cheeks in a theatrical pout. He wasn’t expecting the soft noise of pain he got in response.

Izuku realized he’d fucked up almost at once and tried to pull up the collar of his shirt. “Ah, Toshi… no…!”

Too late, Hitoshi had spotted the top edge of a new bruise peeking out the collar of his boyfriend’s shirt. He frowned and tugged Izuku’s shirt gently away from his neck. “Izu, is that a bootprint?!”

Izuku sighed, slumping with defeat. “There was an accident at my morning job.” He admitted and let Hitoshi position him so that he could get a better look at the injury. “I went to a clinic after. It’s just ugly. You know I bruise easily.”

“Accident my ass.” Hitoshi forgot they were in front of other people and pushed Izuku’s bangs back. If he got kicked in the back then he probably fell forward. Sure enough he had a matching cut on his forehead under a bandage hidden by his fluffy hair. “You were at the construction company this morning. Was the architect on site again?”

“No comment.” Izuku muttered, which meant he had been.

“Do you need some ice, sir?” The chef had been studiously ignoring their conversation until Hitoshi uncovered the top edge of the big nasty bruise.

“Yes, please.” Mic spoke up. “Could we get the check too?”

“No!” Izuku gasped. “Please don’t break up Hitoshi’s party because of this.”

“No one is breaking anything up.” Mic assured him. “We’re going to move it to our house and order a pile of sushi. You get to ice your shoulder and we get to look at each other while we talk. I didn’t really think this out when we were picking a restaurant.”

It was subtle, but even Aizawa perked up at the thought of a party tray. Their local sushi bar didn’t usually do delivery, but they made an exception for Mic because he was charming, famous, and didn’t abuse the privilege. 

The chef gladly checked them out and was gladder still when he saw the size of the tip Mic left to encourage him to keep his mouth shut if reporters came by later.

“You know…” Hitoshi said as they walked back in the direction of the house. He had his hand tucked into Izuku’s back pocket and was enjoying the fact that his boyfriend had responded in kind. “...I’m out of school and unemployed. There’s nothing to stop me from following you around all day and punching the bigots you work with.”

Izuku -who was much more comfortable once Mic and Aizawa were walking ahead of them- gave him the side-eye. “I think you imagine a lot more adversity in my life then there actually is.” He said, which was a blatant lie. “Also, you’re not going to be unemployed for more than a few days. You have a nonviolent takedown quirk. You’ll be drowning in job offers soon.”

“I wish everyone had as much faith in me as you.” Hitoshi snorted. “I only got one outright recruitment pitch. A bunch of my class graduated with jobs and merchandise deals.”

“You want merch?” Izuku asked innocently, despite damn well knowing the answer.

Hitoshi shuddered. He’d only recently gotten to the point where he could stand having his picture taken much less to look at it afterwards. “Hell no.” The additional income would be nice, but detrimental to what he actually wanted to do with his life.   

“Aw, I would wear your merch.” Izuku dropped his head on Hitoshi’s shoulder… or as near to it as he could get, which was in the area of Hitoshi’s upper arm. “I’d get everything I saw.”

“You wear everyone’s merch.” That said, it did give him a little thrill to think about a Psyren poster taking up pride of place in Izuku’s gallery wall of Pro Heroes. Maybe he could have one custom made.

“That is true.” Izuku acknowledged. “Doesn’t mean you aren’t special.”

“Here we are.” Mic announced, opening up the front gate. “Push pause on the flirting, children.”

Izuku turned bright red and made a sound like air escaping a balloon as Hitoshi bid a sad farewell to any chance he had of getting lucky that evening; possibly for the next several days.

That didn’t stop him from pulling Izuku down onto his lap once they were inside and assembled around the low living room table. He could rest his chin on the soft cushion of his boyfriend’s thick hair. They did something similar in Izuku’s tiny apartment while they watched TV with Hitoshi’s back up against the side of Izuku’s bed and Izuku leaned back against Hitoshi’s chest.

“Are your parents working tonight, Izuku?” Aizawa asked as he wrote down an order. “We can order enough for two more if you think they’d like to join us.”

Hitoshi could have slapped himself as Izuku stilled in his arms. He caught a glimpse of a panicked Mic making a panicked X with his arms in his peripheral vision. 

“Oh, um. No. It’s just me. Thank you.” Izuku smiled.

In retrospect, Hitoshi realized that he probably should have put off the introduction so he could put more time into prepping Mic and Aizawa so neither of them ended up with a foot in their mouth. Izuku had made the right response in the sense that Aizawa respected restraint and decorum in the face of adversity, but there was also a  good chance that his boyfriend was about to have Eraserhead poking into every aspect of his life because there was nothing that would get Aizawa’s attention like a teenager telling him they on their own and then assuring him they were fine.

Hitoshi was grateful that Aizawa had noticed him struggling and judged him worthy of help, but the problem was that you either got all of Eraserhead’s help or next to nothing. There’d been a few months in there when Hitoshi spent a lot of time alternating between wishing Aizawa was his real father and also wanting to punch him right in his nosey face.

Mic saved the day by asking about the video and watching it put them right back into the party mood.

“Neito-kun is going to murder you if he finds out you have this.” Izuku whispered in his ear when they got to the part where Monoma stopped being able to hide his sniffling and accepted a handkerchief from Kendo to blow his nose with a glorious extended honk.

“Worth it.” Hitoshi whispered back. Monoma had bigger fish to fry anyway. Hitoshi wasn’t the only one who got pictures and was also one of the few people on campus who didn’t owe Monoma if not a bad turn then at least a minorly embarrassing one.

“He’s delicate on the inside.” Izuku had a hard time keeping his face straight even as he said that. “Oh, Kendo texted me earlier saying there was a get together tomorrow for the Hero department’s graduating class. She said you never replied to her.”

So she’d texted his boyfriend and got him in trouble, the snitch. Kendo had something like four younger siblings, five if you counted Monoma, and that meant she fought dirty when she wanted something. It was awesome until he was her target. 

“I was pretending I didn’t see it.” Hitoshi grumbled and hid his face in Izuku’s good shoulder. He knew the party Izuku was talking about. Two of Bakugo’s barnacles had found a club that took reservations from minors and were ready to make up for three years of intense studying and no social lives. “That place is going to be crawling with paparazzi. Someone’s going to end their career before it even gets started.”

“Your classmates are that wild?” Izuku gave him a skeptical look.

Well, in all honesty no . UA students tended to be hyper-ambitious and driven weirdos, but not troublemakers --except for all the times they totally got into trouble. Fortunately, it wasn’t the ‘drunk teenager’ kind of trouble. It was the ‘Oops I accidentally broke the law to save downtown Musutafu and now everybody has to sign another damn NDA’ kind of trouble. 

“Kendo said it was a dance club.”

Oh no. That was tempting. 

They’d only had a handful of real proper dates and two of them had been dancing, which Hitoshi hadn’t expected to enjoy as much as he did. Izuku wouldn’t know rhythm if it introduced itself, but he made up for it in infectious enthusiasm and flailing. Hitoshi couldn’t feel self conscious dancing next to him because he knew absolutely no one on the dancefloor was going to be looking at him.

By that same argument, though, there was no way Hitoshi was going to get on a dancefloor by himself.

Hitoshi gave him a look. “Why are you trying to convince me to go?” He asked. “It’s not going to be any fun unless you’re there.” 

“Well…” Izuku smiled at him and turned himself sideways in Hitoshi’s lap so he could lay his cheek against Hitoshi’s shoulder, which was just fighting dirty. Hitoshi had a hard enough telling him ‘no’ on a normal day. Turning his boyfriend down when he was being cute and affectionate was impossible. “...I might have tomorrow free.”

“What, the whole day?” He felt a spike of excitement at Izuku’s nod. That was different . “I can’t remember the last time we had a day off at the same time; not since before finals. Are you sure you want to hang out with my classmates? They’re all freaks.”

“Here I was thinking you’d enjoy watching people make themselves look dumb.”

“I do enjoy that now that you mention it even though I already have three years of dirt on them.” Hitoshi acknowledged. He wasn’t going to miss the majority of his classmates, but there were a few he wouldn’t mind seeing out of school as real people. “I want the rest of the day though; no errands, no helping a neighbor move, no looking for lost dogs. Just me.”

“Deal.” Izuku capitulated too easily and Hitoshi tipped him backwards to get a look at his expression. The brat was laughing at him. “I took the whole day off to just spend time with you.” Izuku admitted.

Mic’s camera shutter went off again. 

“Don’t mind me.” He said and grinned as he lined up another shot. “You two just keep being cute!”

His second shot was of Hitoshi blushing bright as a candle with Izuku still cradled in one arm as he covered his face with both hands, which did nothing to hide his bright red ears.  

WM: I’m mad at you.

RT: The fuck did I do?

WM: BF saw your big stupid footprint on me and now he’s determined to fight someone.

WM: If you use me as a springboard again I’ll let him have you.

RT: Well, that’s all right. Throw Fukushima under the bus. Asshole deserves it.

WM: Why does everyone hate that guy so much? He’s not even interesting. 

RT: Hint. It’s because he’s a dick.

WM : No argument. He’s just a boring dick; middle aged underachiever that takes out his frustrations on his work crew. It’s not especially interesting psychology. Nothing for people to get so worked up over.

RT: Not every antagonist in your life is going to be an excitingly complex supervillain. Sometimes you just get a garden variety asshole who uses the job his daddy got him to trip teenagers into cement mixers. 

WM: Are you still mad about that?

RT: Yes. 

RT: Speaking of worksites, are you gonna be on location tomorrow? The asbestos remediation team got done ahead of schedule. I’m gonna ask that potential recruit to come in early. Once we get your new field partner secured, I can start looking for patrollers. 

WM: No, I promised BF we’d have the day. Plus, we don’t know if I passed.

RT: Bullshit we don’t know. Orca gave me the wink.

WM: He can wink? Whales don’t close their eyes unless they’re sleeping.

RT: It was a metaphorical wink; like a meaningful expression.

WM: Are you sure you’re not projecting because Kugo-san doesn’t really have different expressions…

RT: Punk, I will come over there to beat your ass. Don’t think I won’t.

RT: Anyway, I can do the interview myself.

WM: Sorry.

RT: Nah. Have fun with your boy. Then you can spend the day after that quitting all your crap part times.

WM: We still don’t know that I passed.

RT: Don’t you fuckin start with me. I am not dealing with sidekicks by myself. If we got to have a patrolling force then I will not be babysitting them by myself while you go pretend to be a waiter. One way or the other you will commit to having one goddamn career. I will hire you as a civilian contractor if I fuckin gotta.

RT: Pain in my ass.

WM: Baristo.

RT: What

WM: I got fired from the cafe a while ago. 

RT : The fuck did you do?

WM: Not really sure. The manager started yelling and I was asleep on my feet so I zoned after a while then he made me take off my apron and leave. I got another job at a coffee shop.

RT: Cool, you’re quitting that one too. Also, I’m getting an espresso machine for the agency since apparently you know how to do that now. Fuck knows we’re gonna need it, surrounded by highschool aged fetuses.

WM: I’m a highschool aged fetus.

RT: You don’t count. 

WM: Gotta go. BF is out of the shower. My turn.

RT: Ew. I don’t need to know you’re getting laid.

WM: Not like that. I’m at his parents’ place tonight. We stayed up watching cat videos until the trains stopped running so they told me to stay over.

RT: That’s so boring. Where did I go wrong with you?

RT: Also, his parents? The Stepford assholes? I thought we hated them?

WM: No, the teachers he lives with. I never saw them together before, but they imprinted on him hard. It’s like that meme of the police lady with the dog.

RT: Nice to know it was mutual. I’ll give you the report on the new guy tomorrow. Get some sleep for once.

WM: Night.

For once, Hitoshi woke up without needing his alarm ...or the one after that ...or the emergency back up one after that ...or Mic sticking his head in the door to tell him it was time for breakfast. He even felt like he’d slept for more than five minutes.

Izuku was up already because he was an alien, but he was also a very muscular alien doing complicated yoga right next to the bed where Hitoshi could enjoy the show without having to move his head or leave his warm cocoon of blankets.

“Morning.” His greeting broke on a yawn and Izuku smiled without looking in his direction. He was balanced on his palms with his elbows bent as he folded his legs over his head to rest his knees on the floor. It hurt just to look at, but didn’t seem to bother Izuku. 

“Good morning. I’ll be done here in a moment.” 

“Don’t rush on my account.” Hitoshi murmured, but also reached for his phone. The notification light was blinking, which meant he had a new message. Unemployed people didn’t get to ignore their inbox in favor of watching their significant other work out.

It turned out to be an email and he grumbled under his breath when he realized it was from Red Tower. The time stamp was from one AM. He knew Pro Heroes kept bizarre hours, but that was ridiculous. 

“ Fuuuuuck. ” He retreated back under his blanket after reading it.

“Wha… Toshi?” There was a thump as Izuku dropped out of his pose and then light when he lifted the blanket to peer under the edge. “Are you okay?”

“No. I gotta go meet somebody in an hour about a job.” He groaned and sat up. He’d have just enough time to shower, dress, and steal one of Aizawa’s gel pouches. “I didn’t think I was going to be the one to fuck up when I made you promise about our day.”

“You didn’t. It’s still early.” Izuku leaned over to kiss his forehead, which did a lot to sweeten Hitoshi’s mood. “I need to go home and change anyway. If you go to your meeting we can meet up after to get a late breakfast afterwards.”

“You’re not mad?” 

“Why would I be mad about being right?” Izuku laughed as he dodged Hitoshi’s playful swat. “I told you that you’d be popular. Anyway, if you’re occupied then I can get my run in.” 

“You’re a masochist.” Hitoshi had tried to run with him, but always ended up getting lapped. He was a graduate of the top hero program in the world and his civilian boyfriend could outrun him without breaking a sweat. He’d be annoyed if it wasn’t also deeply attractive.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Izuku yanked the blanket off him and tossed it across the room. “I’m more of the other thing. Come on, sleeping beauty. Get up!”

“Uuugh.” 

Despite the fact that he would rather do almost anything rather than leave his bed, Hitoshi hauled his carcass into the bathroom for the world’s fastest shower. Izuku was gone by the time he got out, his hair dried, and the foundation layer of his costume on but his boyfriend’s presence could be felt in the form of a protein shake and a gel pouch waiting on the kitchen counter.

Mic was at the stove making real food. “Midoriya told us about your meeting and left you something to take on the train.” He smiled fondly. “He’s a nice boy. I’m glad you brought him over. Do you think we’ll be seeing more of him?”

“Hope so.” Hitoshi shotgunned the gel pouch with an ease that came from way too much practice and then sat down at the table so he could talk while strapping on his armor sections. “He has to work a lot.”

“You mentioned. What does he do?” Mic flipped a perfectly golden pancake. Hitoshi watched and hated life a little. Later. He’d have some real food later.

“Stuff.” Hitoshi realized he’d made a tactical error when Aizawa echoed him from the hallway in a tone of deep suspicion.

“Stuff?” He was out of uniform for once and had a watering can in one hand, which meant he’d been on the veranda watering the plants. “What is stuff?”

Hitoshi sighed. “Ok, if you don’t want the abridged version; he has a bunch of really awful part time jobs that vary from time to time and season to season. Taking off today was a big deal.”

“I’m surprised his school allowed it.” Aizawa padded over to watch over Mic’s shoulder. He didn’t often eat things that weren’t super efficient meal replacements, but he made an exception for pancakes. Hitoshi was 90% sure it was because Aizawa had a secret sweet tooth. All the high efficiency meal replacements he liked were sweet flavors. “He’s your age, right?”

“It wasn’t really an issue. He didn’t get to go to highschool.” Hitoshi strapped on his chest panel and powered on his suit. The faceplate bleeped happily from where it sat on the table. He realized both his teachers were staring at him. “What? Highschool isn’t mandatory.”

“Did he not get in?” Mic asked, paused in the act of pouring another pancake. “He seemed really smart.”

Izuku and Mic had gotten into a very happy fight about the intersection of Media and Heroism in the modern age the night before. Hitoshi had been worried until he realized they’d both been having a blast arguing their respective corners. 

“No, he wasn’t allowed to sit exams at all. All the places he applied to refused to issue him an exam ticket.” Hitoshi had seen the rejection letters. Izuku hid them in a box under his bed and Hitoshi had seen it once when he was over helping with New Year’s cleaning. You couldn’t claim that he hadn’t tried. There’d been letters from nearly every highschool in Musutafu that Hitoshi knew of--including UA, which was still something Hitoshi struggled to parse his feelings about. UA had been good for him in the end, but he’d had to go through a lot of grief just to make it to the starting line and they hadn’t even let Izu in the door.

Technically UA allowed quirkless students, but the only ones you ever heard about were rich people's kids, prodigies, and the odd legacy student.

The only places Izu didn’t have letters from were the inner city public schools that boasted open enrollment and were less flatteringly known in the news as ‘villain factories'. No highschool diploma at all was better than being a graduate of one of those places. 

Unfortunately, Izu had been applying to schools before news broke about the massive admissions collusion scandal in the Musutafu Municipal School district. Unless you were applying to a Hero program, quirks weren’t supposed to be part of the considerations for a student’s school application. Despite that, a lot of public middle schools (whose funding was directly affected by the quality of students they turned out) had been sharing information on ‘exceptional candidates’ with the schools those students chose to apply at --whether or not the students in question actually had the academic chops to study there or not. 

The news had made a big deal about how highschools were cherry picking students according to their quirks and disregarding their performance on the entrance exams. No one really discussed the other likely outcome of the admissions collusion, which was that they’d probably been screening out the kids with ‘bad’ quirks too --or in Izu’s case, no quirk at all.

Everything came out around final exam time in Hitoshi’s second year, which was probably why Mic didn’t make the connection himself. They’d still been reeling from the USJ Assault and Kamino Ward. Aizawa had still been in and out of physical therapy. Everyone had been on guard and didn’t have a lot of time to pay attention to the news. The only reason Hitoshi had paid attention was because Izuku had been following the story. 

“Look, I gotta go. We can talk about this later?” Preferably never.

Mic gaped and put his spatula down harder than was really necessary. “Hitoshi, that’s illegal.”

“Yeah, it is.” He’d fought that fight several times before. That had been one of his first big reality checks about his future as a hero; learning that the law was only as good as the people enforcing it. “The police told him he’d need to sue, which takes a lawyer, which takes money, which he didn’t have. Even then, there was no guarantee he’d win his case. All the really good schools in town are private, which means they can make whatever rules they want for admission.” He stood up, grabbed his head piece, and collected his overnight bag. “I really have to go now. I’ll see you guys tomorrow, all right?”

“Good luck!” Mic called after him. Aizawa was conspicuously silent.

Watchtower was located in Jedha ward, which was a thirty minute train ride from Mic and Aizawa’s house. It wasn’t an awful commute, but it was awkward to ride in his costume. Little kids stared at him, while the adults tried to figure out if he was someone they knew about. Fortunately no one tried to talk to him. 

The good news was that he wouldn’t have to do this too often. Once he landed a job he’d be able to leave his suit in a vault at the agency and commute in his civvies, but the interview dress code for new heroes was full costume. So he was stuck for the moment.

The train emptied out as they approached his stop and when they arrived the passengers had been whittled down to Hitoshi and someone who looked like they were riding just to keep warm. Sure enough, Hitoshi was the only one who got off at the Jedha stop.

The agency wasn’t too far from the train station, which was a small blessing. It meant he didn’t have to walk far and eventually the agency would make the area around the train stop much safer. 

Still, Hitoshi acknowledged that would take some doing as he took in the boarded up shop fronts, dirty streets, and groups of adults hanging out on street corners despite the early hour.

He hated it when Aizawa was right, but it happened often enough that he’d gotten habituated to the feeling. At the moment, Mic was right too and that was kind of weird.

Watchtower Agency was a squat little black building in the middle of an extensive renovation. The only reason he found it was because he had the address and his GPS zoomed down to the street level. There was a canvas draped shape on the side of building facing the street that would, presumably, one day be a sign. There was an electronic ticker tape display below it that wrapped around the entire circumference of the building.

“HEY!”

Hitoshi looked up to see someone waving at him from the roof. They were backlit by the morning sun, but he was pretty sure it was a hero. A villain probably wouldn’t be hanging out on top of a hero agency and a civilian wouldn’t try to pull off those shoulder-spike things.

“Stay there!” The man shouted and vanished only to reappear a few minutes later at ground level coming around the corner. 

Up close, Hitoshi could see more of his possible future boss. Aizawa had said he was a former vigilante and he looked like it. The man was of average height, but his limbs and chest were stout with the kind of semi-ugly muscle you got from manual labor and not the gym. His nose had been broken at least twice and Hitoshi would bet real money that it had been hooked to begin with. 

His costume wasn’t fancy; black BDUs, a dark red vest over a long sleeve compression top, knee high lace up boots, and a black bandanna mask that covered the entire top half of his face and all his hair. There was something about the way he walked -shoulders forward and arms swinging hard- that tickled his memory, but Hitoshi couldn’t quite place who that reminded him of.

“Are you Red Tower, sir?” Hitoshi asked, kind of hoping he was wrong. The guy looked like he was going to be a lot.

“Well, ain’t you polite?” The man snorted and came to a stop, weight set back on one heel with his arms crossed as he gave Hitoshi an unimpressed once over. “Yeah, that’s me. Watchman isn’t around today. All goes well, you get to meet him later. You Psyren?”

“Yes, sir.”

Red Tower snorted and spat off to one side. “Ain’t no sirs around here. I answer to Tower, Hideo, or Hey Asshole. It’s all the same to me. You got a nickname I should know about?”

That persistent sense of familiarity intensified.

“No, s… I prefer to use my Hero name while in uniform. I’m comfortable with using personal names off duty though.”

“Good, good. That’s how we roll around here anyway.” Tower nodded towards the front entrance of Watchtower, which was a powered sliding door currently propped open with a dowel rod. Hitoshi followed him inside. 

The walls were bare -all the way down to drywall in places- and the subflooring was exposed. Someone was going to put in tile judging by the stack of boxes in one corner of the reception area, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Still, it wasn’t a bad space. Hitoshi knew from his internships that not all agencies were put together logically or securely. The reception area acted as a bottleneck for the entire building. There was an open place for a security door behind the front desk that let into a short hallway with two meeting rooms on either side. He could see another security door at the end of the hall. That one had been installed and was live. 

“We’ll talk in here. If it goes well, we can do a tour.” Tower showed him into the more finished of the two conference rooms. Neither had flooring; just exposed concrete. However one room had been outfitted with a pair of folding chairs. Tower dropped into the bigger of the two with a sigh. “The agency building is a work in progress, but we’re on schedule to open the doors in April. We’ll be patrolling in the meantime and continuing our open investigations. Ain’t gonna lie to you though, some of your work hours may end up involving paint until I get us some more sidekicks in here.”

“You’re hiring more sidekicks?” Hitoshi took the open seat. “How many?”

Tower huffed  and sat forward in his chair with his elbows braced on his knees. “Well, that leads us to an important distinction. Strictly speaking, if you sign with us then you wouldn’t be a sidekick.”

Hitoshi wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He had some experience, but not enough to make it as a solo hero or team lead.

“Watchtower’s kinda unique. We didn’t start out planning to have a building or a patrol district. Starting an agency was a means to an end. We were going to dissolve it once we got what we were after, but it ended up growing legs on us. Watchtower began as an investigative agency. We work with the police going places where it’s too dangerous to send an undercover detective or hunting down leads too tenuous for them to justify the overtime. We closed some real big cases and made a name for ourselves; ended up making the part of the local agency rankings where people start to recognize your name. That got us some governmental attention. They assigned us a district and gave us a budget to establish new premises. So now the agency’s gotta split; the regular patroller branch and the sneaky spy shit branch.” 

Suddenly Tower’s interest in Hitoshi made a lot more sense. Sneaky spy shit was squarely within his wheelhouse.

Tower groaned and popped his back. “I’m getting too old for this, which is part of the problem. Three years ago, when my partner and I got started, I didn’t think I was ever going to slow down. Fact of the matter is that I can’t keep up with Watchman anymore the way I used to. He started doing this parkour shit. I don’t even wanna think about it.” He sobered and pinned Hitoshi with a steel-gray eye. “You know why I asked you here, Psyren?”

“I have some general guesses, but I don’t know for sure.” Somehow, despite Izuku’s confidence, Hitoshi did not think Tower was too concerned with non-violent villain apprehension. 

“Truth is; I’ve had my eye on you for a couple years now.” Tower said. His eyes narrowed down to pale slivers between his lashes. “Watchman and I have this little Sports Festival watch party every year cause he’s a big fuckin’ nerd. I been watching you since your first year. I saw you , a little snot nosed gen ed kid with a non-physical villain quirk who was either too dumb or stubborn to know the deck had been stacked against you personally , make it all the way to the final round on nothing but determination and spite. Bet the rest of your time at UA was the same. Your type doesn’t thrive at UA and that’s by design. They want to produce another All Might and their entire curriculum is bent towards that end… yet here you are; graduating UA in the top 20.” 

Hitoshi stilled. No one had ever actually said that outright in his hearing. All the teachers and talking heads in the media liked to pretend that the top program in the country was meritocratic and once you got into the Heroics department that was kind of true. It was just all the gatekeepers you had to get past first that limited the majority of UA Alumni to certain, very specific types of heroes. 

“Watchman is the beating heart of this agency.” Tower continued. “Me? I’m just a bruiser. You can find twenty of me anywhere you look, but Watchtower wouldn’t have taken off without him. He finds our cases. He makes our contacts. He befriends our allies. He exposes our enemies’ soft spots. My job was only ever to keep him alive long enough to do it. Now I’m slowing down just when he’s speeding up. I need someone young to take over and they need the authority to cancel an op if necessary. That’s why you and me are having this little chat. This ain’t sidekick work. You’d be starting as one of the frontliners.”

“I’m not a powerhouse.” In his mind Hitoshi was already halfway out the door. He’d spent some time reading up on Red Tower. They were not even remotely similar types. If Tower was looking for a replacement for himself Hitoshi was the last person he should have been looking at. 

He should have listened to Aizawa and just rejected the offer out of hand. “I’m familiar with your quirk. You breathe lasers and can punch through a brick wall. That’s not a role I can easily step into. Maybe if I was a more experienced...”

“Ain’t looking for a powerhouse to do this.” Tower turned his face a heartbeat too late for Hitoshi to miss the rueful twist of his mouth. “T’be real honest, kid, I’m the one who wasn’t a good fit. There weren't any other options so we made do, but there’s a lot of missions in our past that went south because I can’t do ‘quiet.’ I need someone fast and focused who isn’t afraid to tell Watchman when he’s fucking up or overextending himself. I think that’s you. You got some rough edges and not a lot of experience, sure, but you’ve got the right skills and fewer bad habits than a veteran hero might have. Watchman isn’t a traditional hero.”

Hitoshi had an odd moment of feeling seen .

The older hero didn’t really wait on a response from him. “See, the way I figure; with your background you know what it’s like to fight twice as hard for half as much. Watchman doesn’t have an offensive quirk. He barely has a quirk at all. Everything he does is in his head. You think you were swimming upstream trying to break into Heroics with a ‘villain’ quirk? Try being functionally quirkless. He’s alright in a fight. Better than alright. Shit’s ridiculous, but the fact is that he can’t hunt and watch his own back at the same time. You would be his full time partner.”

“I’d be the one who watches the Watchman?” Hitoshi wanted to bite his tongue as soon as it was out, but Tower was far from offended. In fact the joke earned him a horrifying parody of a smile and Hitoshi realized all at once exactly who Tower had been reminding him of.

Tower slapped his thigh and guffawed. “Kid, you’re alright. So what is it you want? Fame, money, fights? I can get you more of the last one, but the other two are still on the table.”

When he was sixteen he’d had an easy answer; he wanted to prove he was more than his quirk. At nineteen he’d already achieved the recognition of his peer group. He might not get along with all his classmates, but he knew none of them doubted his determination to do good. He’d given up ever proving anything to his parents. “What I want is to not have to move in five years. The people I care about are all located here. My quirk relies on the element of surprise. I can compensate with my support gear somewhat, but I would prefer not to get limited to a certain geographic area.”

“That I can give you for free. Intelligence operations aren’t limited to our district. We go where the leads take us, even other municipalities. The hours aren’t predictable either, which fuckin’ sucks for your private life but it's great when you want to be hard to track. What else? You’re probably not going to be looking for promotional jobs or merch.”

“This area isn’t great; lots of poor, desperate people and a reduced police force. Not everyone becomes a villain because they want to. Sometimes they’re just poor, desperate, or dumb. What’s your plan for that?”

Something in Tower’s demeanour shifted; an intensity that hadn’t been there before. Hitoshi realized he’d found a soapbox and Tower was quick to jump up on it. “Fuckin’ outreach ; advocating for low income housing, job growth, non-standard quirk support. Cutting crime off at its beginnings. That stuff. Can’t do much if they already broke the law except keep ‘em from getting crucified on tv though.”

Tower had started out as a vigilante, hadn’t he? He hadn’t gotten caught either. That either meant he was exceptionally stealthy -which he’d just admitted he wasn’t- or he’d probably kept to the lower rent areas in and around Musutafu where there weren’t enough cops around to bother interfering with what amounted to a volunteer hero. 

That meant he’d spent his career around places like this one and become personally acquainted with the root causes of crime: poverty, desperation, and life without dignity.

“A portion of the overall agency earnings will go towards local community support organizations. Not sure which ones yet. Watchman’s scouting out who we want to partner with, but so far he hasn’t found any he likes. Might end up starting one if no one ends up impressing him, but that’s his show.” Tower shrugged. “Your show too, if you want.”

“I’m interested.” Hitoshi was more than interested. “I want to meet Watchman before we talk about contracts though. I’d like to know who I’d be working with before making a commitment.”

“Yeah, yeah. I figured. I can’t talk money without him around anyway. He’s the CFO.” Tower pushed himself to his feet. “You’re gonna like him though. Little shit makes friends like other people breathe.’

Hitoshi huffed a laugh. “I know someone like that.”

“Yeah? Well, then maybe you’ll have better luck getting him to mind than I have.”

-HS has entered the group chat: Class AAAAAYE-

Shinsou: Guys, I think I just met Bakugo from 20 years in the future after a major redemption arc.

Uraraka: LOL! What’s he like?

Shinsou: Foul mouthed and secretly soft. He talks tough, but keeps slipping up and using big words and correct grammar. Super serious about social reform. It’s hilarious.

Bakugo: I will fucking end you, Eyebags. Who needs a redemption arc?

Uraraka: Aww, look who’s up before noon!

Bakugo : You wanna go , Round Face?

Uraraka: You want another dirt nap that bad? Sure.

Uraraka: Shinsou, where’d you meet a time traveller?

Shinsou: Job interview. Watchtower out in Jedha.

Uraraka: I don’t see them on the job board. I guess you got it?

Shinsou: It wasn’t advertised on the board. Red Tower said he’d be recruiting for patrollers soon though. Why, are you still looking? 

Bakugo: Jedha is a slum. Watchtower just made the municipal top 50. The fuck are they doing out there?

Shinsou: Fighting crime, one presumes.

Uraraka : Yeah, I had that one offer, but it turns out they wanted me to have a permanent escort. On account of I’m so *~ delicate~* . I wouldn’t have minded just doing rescue and excavation work, but Sero got an offer from the same agency and I found out mine was like 20% under his and I got less vacation. So now I’m hunting again.

Shinsou: Idiots.

Uraraka: It’s whatever, but real talk: are they gonna advertise soon? Watchtower?

Shinsou: I can give Red Tower your number. If you can get along with Bakugo, you’ll like him.

Bakugo: All right, where the fuck are you. I’m going to beat your ass.

Shinsou: The building is still in reno so if you go and think you got lost, you didn’t.

Bakugo: Oi!

Uraraka: Thanks, you’re the best! Are you coming tonight?

Shinsou: Yeah, I got talked into it.

Bakugo: Do not ignore me, assholes

Uraraka: Oooooo! Was it the mysterious boyfriend?

Uraraka: DO WE FINALLY GET TO MEET HIM?

Shinsou : Ugh, yes .

Uraraka: I was already excited, but now I’m pumped! 

Hitoshi looked up from his phone, which continued to ping with notifications, as the train announced his stop. He tapped out a quick farewell and grabbed his bag. He’d used a public changing station to swap out his costume for normal clothes, but he’d be happier when his gear was safely locked up.

Izuku’s apartment wasn’t in an area nearly as bad as Jedha, but the Ryloth neighborhood wasn’t all that great either.

‘I’m gonna ask him today.’ Hitoshi thought as he dropped a few bills into the cup next to the old man who pretty much lived under the stoop of Izuku’s apartment building. 

He’d already pretty much made up his mind about the Watchtower job. Their goals and morality seemed to align. That was rare enough in a civilian job. In Heroics it was a unicorn. If it hadn’t been for Aizawa’s cautions, he’d have probably signed that morning. No matter what kind of money he ended up making, though, it would be enough to pay for a better apartment somewhere safer and cleaner than Ryloth.

Assuming Izuku was willing to move in with him.

He didn’t let himself think about that as he passed up the elevator without even looking to see if it had been magically fixed since the week before.

Any plans Hitoshi had vacated the premises when he reached Izuku’s door and realized it was standing just ever so slightly open. It swung in at Hitoshi’s touch to reveal his boyfriend curled up on his side just within the entrance. He was still dressed to run and had his shoes on.

Hitoshi’s heart stopped.

“Izu!” 

Izuku popped up, eyes wide and wet. “W… Toshi!” He scooted back down the narrow hall that divided the microscopic kitchenette from his bathroom and then stopped to kick his sneakers off. There was a blue envelope clutched in one of his shaking hands. “You’re back! I'm sorry, I didn’t get changed. I can… I just need to...”

“Hey, hey, no.” Satisfied that this had been an emotional emergency and not a physical one, Hitoshi took the moment to kick his shoes off and close the door behind him. He dropped to his knees beyond the sunken entrance area and crawled over to hover over his upset boyfriend. “What happened? Are you okay?”

Izuku tried to shake his head and nod at the same time. “I-it’s good news!” He insisted “I just convinced myself I wouldn’t…” He broke on a laugh and surged up to wrap Hitoshi in a powerful embrace --a really, really powerful embrace. Hitoshi felt his ribs protest. “I did it!”

“That’s good.” Still confused, Hitoshi returned the hug. “What are we happy about?”

That made Izuku freeze. He pulled a little way back so they could look each other in the eye. “I, uh… I’ve been working on something. Since before we met. It was a long shot and...” He admitted, turning pink. “...it’s big. It’s real big.”

“How big?” Hitoshi could think of any number of things Izuku might have been doing in private. He knew the boy had plans for his own future, although he didn’t talk about them too often. It was like he was afraid to jinx himself and that hadn’t really bothered Hitoshi until recently. Both their futures were in flux and he needed to know for sure that they were going in the same direction.

Izuku took a breath. “Big enough that I could quit my part time jobs.”

That was more than big. That was huge.

“Holy shit. Seriously?”  

Izuku nodded. “Big enough that I’d have to.”

“Ok, but what happened? What did you do?” 

Izuku looked down at the crumpled envelope with a thoughtful expression. “Hitoshi…” There was something new in his eyes when he looked back up. “... do you want me to tell you everything right now? Or do you want a big romantic reveal?”

Shit . It was like Izuku knew him. 

The suspense might actually kill him, but Hitoshi loved a big romantic reveal. He sat back on his heels and cupped the back of his neck as he thought about it.

It had started up after their inauspicious beginnings, which had been Izuku asking him out via text while they were sitting side by side in the same room; the most teenage boy move you could possibly imagine. 

Hitoshi had been too busy dying of a heart attack and trying to say ‘yes’ at the same time to really mind it, but Izuku had felt bad about it afterwards and had determined to make up for it later by getting someone to drop rose petals on them from a second story balcony when he’d asked Hitoshi if he wanted to commit.  

“On one condition.”

So far in their relationship, Izuku had been the one who asked all the big questions. Just once, Hitoshi wanted to be the one to push for more. 

“What?” Izuku sat up properly to cup Hitoshi’s face in his hands. 

He’d been planning a long romantic speech in his head, just two steps shy of proposing really. It flew out of his mind as soon as he opened his mouth. What came out instead was, “I want you to think about us moving in together.”

“I…” Izuku gaped like a fish before hauling him in for kisses all over his face. “I mean, yes, absolutely. Are you sure? I thought you might want to stay with your teachers for a little while longer now that you aren’t in school.”

“They’re probably looking forward to having the house to themselves again.” Hitoshi shook his head. “I’m not… I can’t assume.”

“Hitoshi.” There was a little crinkle in between Izuku’s brows and it was one that Hitoshi hated to see because he only got it when he thought someone was being stupid and he was too polite to tell them so. “I think maybe you should. It seems to me like they want you to assume.”

“Do you not want to live with me?” Hitoshi’s stomach swooped low with sudden fear. He did not want to be the guy who got dumped at graduation. He didn’t want to get dumped at all ever.

Izuku just huffed at him. “I want to be around you all the time and you know it.” He sobered though. “It’s just… look, Toshi, it’s really easy for people to grow apart when they live in different places. Your relationship with Mic and Aizawa was different before graduation. There was stuff they couldn’t say to you. There was stuff you couldn’t say to them either, right? But they seem like they want to be your family for real. You’re eighteen. You only have so much longer to be a kid and I don’t want to see you miss out on that. Not for me. I’m not going to go anywhere. I can wait as long as you need.”

“I don’t want to wait.” Hitoshi reached out to push Izuku back down. “...and I’m not a kid. You’re two months younger than me. Don’t act all jaded and world weary with me.”

“I’m not.” Izuku settled his arms around Hitoshi’s neck. “Childhood’s a lot like a balloon. It’s hard to get it back once you let it go and you --you miss it once it’s gone.” He confessed.

Hitoshi frowned. “Hey, you didn’t let yours go. It got taken from you. That’s different.”

“There’s things I could have done.” Izuku sighed. “I could have relied on my mom more. I could have been more honest about what was happening. I thought she’d be disappointed in me, but what she ended up thinking instead was worse.”

“That’s how an adult thinks.” Hitoshi poked him in the side and rolled so they could both rest comfortably on the floor, limbs tangled, and foreheads touching. “You can’t apply adult logic to a child’s situation. You were a kid and reacted the way a kid reacts. Scared kids lie and hide stuff. That’s not on you. That’s on your past circumstances and a bunch of hostile asshole adults.” 

“She isn’t an asshole though.” Izuku tucked his face into Hitoshi’s shoulder. They both pretended his eyes hadn’t started watering the second he tried to talk about his mother.

“Maybe she wasn’t…” Hitoshi had his doubts about that, but Izuku was stubborn and anxious enough to leave home and stay gone even when his mom would have taken him back so he couldn’t rule the possibility out all together. Not everyone had sociopathic reptiles for genetic donors the way Hitoshi did. “...but those teachers in your middle school were and so were the admissions staff at all those highschools.”

Izuku made a noncommittal noise against his throat. “We were talking about you. How did it end up being about me? This is not the romantic day out I had planned.” He said after a while. They’d reached the deflection stage of emotional conversation and Hitoshi knew he wasn’t going to get anything else out of Izuku that day. 

Silver lining: he had gotten out of talking more about Mic and Aizawa. 

“Hmmm, cuddling with my boyfriend and nobody has to be anywhere for hours.” Hitoshi agreed. “You’re right. It’s the worst.”

He got smack on the flank for his troubles, but Izuku’s eyes were dry (albeit red) when he looked up. “I’m sweaty.” He said. “...and gross.”

Hitoshi grinned as a thought occurred to him. “Hey, you’re right. We should get you out of those damp clothes.”

Izuku’s puppy-like yelp as Hitoshi flipped him onto his back again was the kind of music he thought he could spend his whole life listening to.

RT: Need you for a meeting tomorrow.

WM: I thought I was quitting all my jobs to commit to one career tomorrow.

RT: You can fuckin do both. How long does it take to open a door, give somebody the finger, and then leave anyway?

WM: Wow.

WM: Your old resume makes so much more sense to me now. 

WM: So is this the new guy? You like him for sure?

RT: He made a Watchman joke and asked me about our plans for social justice. I probably just found your platonic soulmate. You’re welcome.

WM: Hope not. BF will cut him. 

WM: I can swing by whenever tomorrow, but I’m booked for the evening.

RT: What, got another hot date?

WM: Sort of. I’m gonna tell him.

RT: Tell who what?

RT: Wait, shit. Seriously? I thought you were going to wait until you got your license.

WM: I did.

RT: Are you fucking with me

RT: You had better not be fucking with me

WM: My exam results got couriered over this morning. BF found me in a dramatic puddle on the floor. I’m officially a Pro. 

RT: HELL yes. Fucking told you so!

WM: Yes, yes. You were right. I was wrong. 

RT: What else is news?

RT: Come over in the morning. Meet the new guy. Then you’ve got the rest of the day. 

RT: You’d better like this guy. He’s already found me two more recruits. Good ones too. 

WM: Aww, you already got attached. That’s so cute.

RT: Emotional availability is manly as shit. You know who doesn’t get attached? Dead-eyed assholes who end up in a ditch after a year on the job.

RT: Anyway, you two are going to get on like a house on fire.

WM: Property damage and screaming?

RT: As long as it’s not my property or me screaming, I’m willing to call it good.

Club JAZ was one of those big multifloor affairs in downtown Musutafu. Every level had a different theme. The level where Bakugo’s squad had swung a VIP party room was black lit with glow in the dark fish. A lot of people had decorated themselves with body paint, which Hitoshi had not known was a thing and Izuku somehow had.

“What’s all this?” Hitoshi tilted Izuku’s face from side to side, careful not to mar his impressive Ragdoll themed face paint. “I didn’t know you liked makeup. You been holding out on me?”

He laughed and shook his head. “No. I’m hiding the fact that I don’t have cool clubbing clothes, but if I’d known you’d like it then I’d have tried it earlier.”

It was true, Izuku just had on black pants and a black t-shirt with a white slogan that read ‘FANCY’ across his chest in white, which shone slightly blue under the lights. Hitoshi had wimped out and recycled the outfit Mic had picked out for him the day before only he had the shirt halfway unzipped as suggested.

“You’re the fanciest thing here.” Hitoshi promised and slung an arm across Izuku’s shoulders.

A cocktail robot intercepted before they got too far beyond the elevator. It IDed them and issued them two bright pink wristbands marked MINOR in black that they could preload with money for non-alcoholic drinks. It was reassuring that the bar, despite the industry’s general lax attitude towards Japan’s drinking age, took their alcohol sales seriously. Maybe they’d get through the night without someone ending up on the news. The black light was already going to make it tough for someone to get photos. 

He’d already spotted Ashido with her shoulders painted in lime green leopard spots bouncing around the dancefloor with Jirou, who’d forgone the bodypaint.

“I think the VIP room is over there.” Izuku pointed at a little loft area screened off with tinted glass and crowded with young people. There were animated laser projections on the glass of lazily circling schools of fish that made it hard to see in from the dance floor. “Wanna check it out first?”

Hitoshi nodded and put his height and post-UA bulk into breaking a path through the crowded floor. Izuku followed close behind, holding onto the back of his shirt so the press of bodies didn’t close in on him and sweep him away.

A robot stood guard at the bottom of the stairs, but it let Hitoshi and Izuku pass after beeping at their wristbands and flashing a green smiley emoji across its faceplate.

It was quieter in the VIP room and the music was muted to a level that allowed for conversation. The floor was littered with squashy couches and enormous bean bags. The rear wall was taken up by a private drink station. 

“Wow.” Izuku murmured. “How did a bunch of highschool kids reserve this?”

“Anything is cheap if you split the cost enough times!” Kirishima popped through the crowd waving hard. “Hey, I don’t recognize you. Are you from a different program or…” He squinted and then looked at Hitoshi. “... oh, hey! You’re the boyfriend!” Hitoshi bit down on the urge to growl as Kirishima got Izuku into a one armed hug and ruffled his hair. “Great to meet you at last!”

“Um, yeah, I guess that’s me?” Izuku gave Hitoshi a questioning look. “Toshi, what did you tell people?”

Kirishima did not hesitate to rat him out. “Absolutely nothing. He’d just smile at his phone a lot then glare and tell us to stay in our lanes when we asked him about it.”

“Fat lot of good it did.” Hitoshi groused and extracted Izuku from Kirishima’s octopus arms.

“Aww.” Kirishima recovered fast. “Hey, have you seen Mina?”

“She’s on the dancefloor with Jirou.”

“Cool! You guys have fun. It was good to meet you!”

Hitoshi sighed as Kirishima bounced off. “Typical.”  

“Oh, look. There’s Kendo.” Izuku waved back and Hitoshi followed the line of his gaze to a big U-shaped couch where a bunch of the Class B kids were hanging out. Kendo was waving at them from between Tetsutetsu and Monoma. 

Hitoshi made a beeline for them. He’d learned early on that the members of class B made a great repellant when it came to the more boundary challenged members of class A.

“I see Kirishima got you at the entrance.” Monoma observed as Izuku dropped onto the couch next to him. “Nice make up.” He added and poked Izuku in the cheek. 

“Thanks! Don’t mess it up.” Izuku batted at his hand and flopped over so Hitoshi had to hold up his weight. “Real talk though; what has Hitoshi been telling people about me? Kirishima called me the boyfriend with really a lot of emphasis; like I was bigfoot.”

“More like a unicorn.” Tetsutetsu snorted. “No one had time or energy to date so Class A got really invested in Shinsou’s relationship because he’s the only one who’d managed to get and keep one. He wouldn’t give them any details and it drove them crazy.”

“ They got invested?” Kendo echoed, flatly, and turned to give Tetsutetsu a deeply skeptical look before turning back to face Izuku. “There was a rumor around the beginning of year three that you guys broke up and Tetsu actually cried.”

Hitoshi flushed and Izuku subtly squeezed his hand. The beginning of year three had been rough. His parents had forgotten to load money into his bank account for the first month and a half so he’d been hungry and cranky all the time. They hadn’t replied to his calls or emails either so for a while he thought he’d been cut off all together and hadn’t known what to do. 

Part time jobs weren’t permitted at UA and his workload wouldn’t have allowed for one anyway, so he’d been getting by on just his lunch meal plan and whatever Izuku could sneak him until they suddenly started sending him money again one day without comment or explanation.

“They’re a really nice couple, okay!” Tetsutetsu crossed his arms and pouted. 

“I’m sorry you were worried.” Izuku had mastered the art of sincerely apologizing for things that weren’t really his fault. Hitoshi would have fought him on the subject, but it was a great technique for diffusing tension. He himself could not manage that level of sincerity when his heart wasn’t in it or even anywhere near it. “We’re okay.”

“G-good.” Tetsutetsu coughed and forged ahead. “Anyway, we met you in second year so some people…” He said with a significant look at Monoma. “...liked to taunt the kids in class A with whatever they could, including breadcrumbs of information about your relationship. So that made it worse and it’s why you’re famous at UA.”

Monoma refused to look at Tetsu. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m sure you don’t.” Kendo agreed. 

“Gosh.” Izuku looked up at Hitoshi. “You were the one holding out! I had no idea there was so much drama in the Hero classes.”

Hitoshi snorted. “The hero department is nonstop drama. You have no idea. Everyone is in everyone’s business and boundaries are a myth. Opening the dorms only made it worse.”

The class B kids all muttered “Truth!” and sipped their drinks as one. Izuku got a thoughtful look.

“Do you want a drink?” He asked Hitoshi. “Since we aren’t dancing right away?”

Hitoshi nodded. “Whatever juice they have is fine.”

“He looks cute.” Kendo cooed as soon as he was out of earshot. “Boys in makeup are the best.”

“Some boys.” Hitoshi objected.

“Some boys.” Tetsutetsu seconded.

“I could pull it off.” Monoma decided out loud because of course he would. “Kendo, do you still have those markers?”

She shook her head. “I gave them to Ashido, Yaomomo, and Uraraka.” She turned to Hitoshi. “I’m glad you brought Izukun out. I had this weird fear we’d never see anyone from our year again after graduation unless we crossed paths while working and he’s a normal person so we’d never see him again ever.”

Izuku’s words from before came back to haunt Hitoshi. ‘It’s really easy for people to grow apart when they live in different places.’

He hated it when that punk was right.

“Class A has a group chat that people are still using. We should make one.” Hitoshi suggested. “If nothing else we can share job leads.”

“Oh, nice!” Kendo perked up. “I still haven’t gotten an offer I like yet and I know Monoma is still looking too.”

Hitoshi started to ask Monoma for confirmation when a commotion caught his eye. It was in the direction of the drink station and a few seconds later a pale-faced Izuku came hurrying towards them with no drinks and a hunted expression.

“We need to go.” He said low and raspy as soon as he reached Hitoshi’s side. “I’m sorry. We need to go now.”

“What…?”

“Get back here!”  

Unfortunately, Hitoshi got his answer straight away when Bakugo came barging through the clear space in the crowd Izuku had left in his wake. He looked… it was hard to remember sometimes just how much he’d mellowed since their first year until he had a bad moment and Bakugo was having a very bad moment just then. His lips were peeled off his teeth like a feral animal and his eyes were contracted down to mad little pinpricks. He looked deranged. 

“Oh, hell no.” Hitoshi murmured and vaulted over the back of the sofa to interject himself between Izuku and the steamroller that was Bakugo in the middle of a bitch fit. To give him credit, Bakugo pulled up short when it was clear Hitoshi wasn’t about to move aside for him. A muscle in his jaw ticked. 

“Move, Eyebags.” He managed at last, past his anger. “I need to talk to that --guy.” His tone suggested he’d discarded several nasty epithets before settling on ‘guy.’

“That’s too bad.” Hitoshi replied coolly. “He doesn’t want to talk to you. Why don’t you go find your friends and cool down?”

Unfortunately, Bakugo wasn’t dumb enough to reply to a direct question from Hitoshi. Instead he glared over Hitoshi’s shoulder at Izuku. “You gonna keep hiding behind a stranger like a coward, Deku? Guess you haven’t changed any.”

“Go away, Kacchan.” Izuku’s voice was quieter than Hitoshi had ever heard it. There was a wealth of history in that little trembling voice that somehow still refused to be cowed. “We don’t have anything to talk about.”

That flipped some switch in Bakugo’s brain and he puffed up like an angry dog. “Bullshit, we don’t. You think you can just do whatever the hell you want? Your mom is...”

Hitoshi went from annoyed to pissed so fast it hurt. “Back off, asshole. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bakugo rocked back on one heel. “Huh.” He looked Hitoshi up and down. Then his eyes drifted towards where Izuku was holding onto Hitoshi’s sleeve. “Not a stranger, then. Man, Deku, you got even more pathetic than I thought. Couldn’t be a hero so you just found somebody new to follow around; that it?”

...somebody new?

Hitoshi had never asked Izuku if he’d dated before. For one thing he didn’t want to be that guy and for another he didn’t want to invite that jealousy into his life. Bakugo, though? He couldn’t picture someone voluntarily dating Bakugo much less Izuku who was way too nice for that. He couldn’t even picture Bakugo voluntarily dating someone. 

“That’s really funny coming from the guy picking a fight with a civilian.” Monoma drawled. Hitoshi caught a glimpse just in the corner of his eye of Monoma’s hand running lightly along Kendo’s proffered forearm; nabbing a quick copy of her quirk. “I mean, we already knew you were a brute and a bully. Good on you though; you found a brand new low!”

Tetsutetsu had a better idea, though. “You do remember this is a party your squad spent a lot of effort putting together, right?” He pointed out. “You wanna explain to Kirishima and Ashido that you were the one who got everyone kicked out because you had to start a fight?”

Bakugo’s jaw clenched and he took a shaky step back. Hitoshi couldn’t help but acknowledge that alone was a huge difference between year one Bakugo and current day Bakugo. Three years ago the club would have already been burning down. “Whatever, assholes. You don’t even know what you’re in the middle of.” He rasped.

“Neither do you, Kacchan.” Izuku gently pushed Hitoshi to one side. “What happened between Mom and I is between us. I don’t know what you overheard eavesdropping on your mom’s phone calls, but it’s not your business.”

Kacchan?

“She’s worried about you, you dick.” Bakugo snapped.

“My phone number hasn’t changed. She knows how to reach me.” Izuku’s tone stayed even although his eyes took on a sheen of tears. “Why do you care? You made it clear what you thought of me in middle school. You don’t get to come back years later and pretend any part of my life concerns you. We aren’t friends and you made it very clear that we never were.”

Bakugo jerked back. He might have looked less surprised if Izuku had slapped him. It looked for a moment like he might say something, but instead he turned on his heel and took off.

The tension drained out of their group.

“Do you still want to go?” Hitoshi asked quietly. He wasn’t real sure he wanted to stay, but Izuku shook his head.

“I’m done with letting him decide where I get to go or what I get to do.” He murmured and that was that. Hitoshi herded him back toward the couch. It’d be a while before either of them felt ready for the dancefloor, if at all. 

Some day off this was turning out to be.

He would have expected Monoma to ask the big obvious question, but it was Tetsutetsu. “So, uh, what the hell was that?” He winced as Kendo smacked him. “I’ve seen Bakugo go off, but that was something else.”

Izuku shrugged. “I always seem to bring out the worst in him.” He sighed.

“So, he’s, what? Your ex?” Tetsu flinched as both Monoma and Kendo whacked him. “I’m not the only one thinking it!”

“W-what?” Izuku choked and made a big X with his arms. “Nope! No. No way. We just grew up together. We were friendly when we were little, but it didn’t last.”

Hitoshi felt a knot in his chest unkink itself. He wasn’t sure why. He didn’t feel threatened by Bakugo. Even if they had gone out they were clearly never getting back together and Hitoshi could only look good in comparison.

Unfortunately, Kendo hit right at the heart of Hitoshi’s unacknowledged worries. “Does he know that? He looked really shocked when you talked back to him.”

“No, that’s just because I talked back in the first place. I didn’t before. It was middle school. I was a lot more timid then.” Izuku shook his head. 

“Kacchan, though?” She pressed. “Deku , for that matter. Does that mean what I think it means?”

Again, he shook his head. “It’s just a hold over from when we were kids. I called everyone my age ‘chan’ when I was little.” He explained, but his mouth quirked in a wry smile. “If you ask Kacchan, the reason I’m ‘Deku’ is because I’m useless; definitely not because he had trouble reading the kanji in my name in elementary and spent a whole year wondering why my mom kept writing ‘Deku’ on all my stuff.”

“Oh, man. You do have dirt on him.” Kendo whistled low and impressed. “It’s a shame we’re only just finding out now. What did you mean about him eavesdropping on his mom though?”

Hitoshi answered that one. “Oh, he does it to everybody. He’s so loud all the time you never notice him when he’s being quiet. No one in 1-A realized he was doing it until about halfway through second year. He turned up knowing about some stuff about a classmate’s homelife no one remembered telling him. Of course, he only ever gets like half the story and takes it to the worst possible conclusion. Then somehow he makes it all about himself.”

Kendo whistled. “That does sound pretty on brand. I’m impressed you guys came out to the party, though. That was scary.”

“I wasn’t expecting him to come.” Izuku admitted. “He never used to like parties.”

“He still doesn’t.” That was a good thing. Hitoshi sure wasn’t putting them together in a social setting again if he could help it. “His friends were the ones who planned this. To give him due credit, he’ll do just about anything to make them happy. He’ll act like he’s dying and hide in corners, but he’ll do it.”

Surprisingly, that made Izuku smile. “Yeah? That’s good to hear.” He laughed outright at the look the group gave him. “It is though. Kacchan didn’t know how to make friends when we were kids; not with nice people anyway. I really worried about that. The mean kids just followed him around like TV goons and he could barely remember their names.”

“That hasn’t changed, really.” Hitoshi made a face. He wondered if Izuku was one of the people who’d followed Bakugo around. It sounded like he was at least for a while. “Hey, do you still want a drink?” Hitoshi tried to be casual with the question, but failed.

Izuku squinted at him. “You’re not planning to go looking for Kacchan, are you?” He asked with skepticism. “We don’t need to make another scene.”

“No, I’m going to get drinks and come back.” Hitoshi carefully did not promise not to do anything between getting drinks and returning. He must have been convincing because the suspicion eased out of Izuku’s face.

“Okay. Could I get a water, please?”

Hitoshi made sure no one in the group was looking before he started scanning the dark corners of the VIP area for one spikey blonde head. It didn’t take much doing. Bakugo was back to sulking by the drink station where he must have encountered Izuku in the first place. Unfortunately, Kirishima seemed to have gotten to him first. They were standing close and deep in conversation partially hidden by a big statue of an angel fish. 

Curious, Hitoshi got closer and used the statue as cover. It was quiet enough that deep into the semi soundproofed room that he was able to eavesdrop with ease.

“...happened?” Kirishima was talking. “Aoyama said you went off on someone.”

There was a pause before Bakugo’s gruff voice said, with uncharacteristic shame. “Deku’s here.”

“Deku?” Kirishima sounded at a loss for a second before the penny dropped. “Deku Deku?” He hissed. “Are you serious? Are you okay?”

Hitoshi frowned. Why the hell wouldn’t Bakugo be fine? He was the one who started yelling.

“I’m fucking fine.” Bakugo snapped.

“So that would be a no.” Kirishima sighed and must have done something judgemental with his expression. “Don’t pout, Bro. It’s not manly. Was he, uh, did he look okay?”

Bakugo didn’t answer right away. “Yeah.” He admitted at length. “Doesn’t look like he’s been sleeping rough or not eating.”

“Okay, good. That’s two worries we can take off the list.” There was a fleshy slap. Kirishima must have clapped Bakugo on the back. Hitoshi got confirmation in the hushed snarl he got as a response. “So… how did it go? I mean, I can kinda guess. Can you give me the details though?”

“He got the drop on me.” Bakugo muttered, almost inaudible. “I was getting a soda, looked up, and there he was. We just fuckin’ stared at each other and I was gonna… you know, but he rabbited. It pissed me off and then we had a scene. Eyebags was there. That Copycat Fucker was shooting off his mouth too and Deku said…” He went quiet and then muttered, “...anyway, I didn’t do it. I fucked up and said a bunch of other shit instead. Can we not do this?”

Hitoshi had a personal theory that UA had been a good environment for Bakugo although clearly not an easy one at first. He’d had all the hallmarks of that one kid who dominated their middle school and so had no idea how to compete with kids at his own level when he got to highschool. 

It might have gone beyond that. Kirishima and Ashido were not followers. They were happy and easygoing, sure, but they also didn’t put up with stuff they didn’t agree with and Kirishima at least had a very strict code of behavior. 

“Aw, Bro.” Kirishima sighed. “I’m sorry. I know that’s not how you wanted it to go.”

“It’s whatever.” Hitoshi could almost hear Bakugo’s shrug.

“Hey, man, don’t…” Kirishima stopped and tried again. “This isn’t meant to be mean, but do you have your regulator on?”

The silence he got as an answer was leaden with guilt.

“I thought there was gonna be drinking.” Bakugo’s tone was hushed and rough, like he’d addressed it to the floor. “So I shut it off before I came.”

“Bro, we picked this place specifically so there wouldn’t be drinking.” 

“Well, I didn’t fuckin’ know that!” Bakugo snapped back.

Kirishima took a deep breath and probably counted to twenty or whatever you did when you’d made the poor life choice of being Bakugo Katsuki’s chief minder. “Okay, that’s on me. I should have said. You can’t read my mind. Sorry, bro.”

“Don’t fucking apologize.” That was probably Bakugo for ‘it’s okay’, but what did Hitoshi know?

“Ok, first order of business: turn the regulator back on and get that rage juice back under control.” Kirishima said. “You’re going to feel bad enough already.”

“...ugh, I’m gonna be a zombie for the next half hour.” Bakugo grumbled after a lengthy pause.

“That’s why you’re gonna stick with me until you even out. The party just got started. You still have plenty of time to have fun. Okay, Bro?”

“This fucking sucks.” Bakugo grumbled.

“I know it does.” Kirishima's tone was low and reassuring. “We can’t help the messed up stuff our brains do.” He paused. “So, you said Shinsou was with Deku?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Was he a little guy in black with kitty facepaint?”

“That’s Ragdoll paint, you degenerate!” Bakugo stopped himself and continued in a more normal volume, “I mean, yeah?”

“Holy shit, Bro.” Hitoshi couldn’t tell if Kirishima sounded delighted or scandalized. “You went off on the Boyfriend.”

“The…” Bakugo made a noise eerily similar to the one Izuku made when Tetsu asked if Bakugo was his ex. Alright, so Hitoshi definitely had nothing to worry about. “Deku? No fuckin way.”

“No man, really. Shinsou introduced us when they got here.” Kirishima insisted. “How can you get mad at that face? He painted his freckles like kitty whiskers!”

“I said it’s not … ugh, could you not press my buttons right now, asshole?” Bakugo’s normally graveled voice was starting to slur a bit. 

“Sorry, Bro.” Kirishima seemed genuinely apologetic. “So, this is good though. If he’s with Shinsou then we can find him later. Then you can try again. Shinsou can set up a meeting.”

Ha. That wasn’t going to happen. 

“Don’t hold your breath.” Bakugo grumbled in an eerie echo of Hitoshi’s own thoughts. “Eyebags wouldn’t even tell you his name . You think he’s gonna set up a meet? Hell no.”

“Well… ugh, and I can’t believe I’m about to say this…” Kirishima groaned. “... but maybe using your words isn’t the best plan. Just this once. You already said a lot, but you’re more of an action kinda guy. Maybe lean into that?”

Hitoshi wanted to keep listening, but he was very aware of the passing time. He left his spot by the statue and circled around so that he approached the drink station from a different, non-suspicious angle. He spotted his quarry still talking, but they spotted him too that time and Kirishima made a shushing gesture at Bakugo who turned to scowl in Hitoshi’s direction.

“I’m just getting drinks. I’m not here for round two.” Hitoshi lied before visibly dismissing the pair of them from his attention. He also pretended not to hear Kirishima trying to get his attention before he left. He already had enough to think about and had reluctantly come to the conclusion that he was going to need to tell Izuku about the conversation he’d overheard, which meant confessing to the fact that he’d overheard it.

Fortunately, he hadn’t been gone so long that anyone felt like they needed to look for him. Uraraka had joined the group in his absence though.

“...no, but really…” She was in the middle of an impassioned argument that only Izuku was really paying attention to. Kendo was in the process of using a reclaimed face marker to give Monoma winged eyeliner and Tetsu got sleepy if he had to sit still and listen to people talk for too long. “...Muay Thai is so much better than kickboxing for heroes.”

“Grappling, though.” Izuku insisted before he spotted Hitoshi. “Toshi!”

“Here you go.” Hitoshi handed Izuku his water bottle before assuming his rightful spot on the couch. “I see you and Uraraka found each other.”

“We’ve adopted each other.” Izuku informed him with gravitas. “Please be kind to my new sister.”

It wasn’t such an outlandish notion, Hitoshi realized as he looked back and forth between Izuku and Uraraka’s shining expressions. Aside from coloration and gender they were basically the same person with their big earnest eyes, compelling smiles, and their ability to turn into stone cold bad asses on a dime.

Hitoshi gave Uraraka a mocking bow. “I’m in your care.”

“I might be in your care after tomorrow.” She laughed.

“Oh?” Hitoshi couldn’t say he hated the idea of working with her. “Good news?”

“We’ll see. I’ll just say you were right about that time traveller thing though. It’s hilarious.”

“Um, guys, details?” Izuku looked back and forth between them.

“Later, when I’m not afraid of jinxing it.” Uraraka promised.

A flicker of light caught Hitoshi’s attention and he looked just in time to see Kirishima hurriedly stow his phone and pretend that he totally hadn’t just taken a picture of their group --or was it of their group? They’d been awful concerned about being able to find Izuku later. Kirishima was hiring on full time with Fatgum’s agency and they had close ties with the MPD. It was not outside the realm of possibility for him to be able to track somebody down with nothing but a cellphone picture.

Ugh, more drama.

‘I wish this class would stop proving me right about crap.’ He thought and let his weight fall to the side so that a laughing Izuku had to prop him up.

The rest of the night was mercifully drama free. They all went out onto the floor together where Hitoshi discovered that Uraraka was also an enthusiastic flailer so dancing with her and Izuku at the same time was like supervising two incredibly energetic puppies. 

He was too tired to ask about Izuku’s ‘big romantic reveal’ by the time they stumbled in the door of his apartment. They barely managed to wash up and change before falling into bed tangled together. For once Hitoshi had no trouble falling asleep. He was out the second his head hit the pillow.

RT: Where are you?

WM: I’m on the train. BF stayed over and I walked him to his parents/teachers. He’s got a follow-up interview scheduled later and needs fresh clothes.

RT: He’s job hunting?

WM: He graduated the other day.

RT: But College though?

RT: Nevermind, I forgot about the Stepfords. Of course he’s job hunting. You wanna hire him? We got the budget and no shortage of work for someone who can keep their trap shut.

WM: I’ll ask after I tell him. He’s good. We’d be lucky to have him, but I don’t know how he’d feel about dating his boss. 

RT: Nobody else in this industry seems to have a problem with it.

WM : You are the guy who keeps saying ‘just because everyone else does it doesn’t mean you should’ right?

RT: Yeah, about drugs and stupid shit. Not about evidence that supports my argument.

RT: We gotta talk about domestic security for him anyway. It’d almost be easier if he worked at the agency and commuted in with you.

WM: He’ll be fine. He can take care of himself and he’s already got an opportunity he seems excited about.

RT: Fine, but that shoebox you live in needs to go. 

WM: No arguments.

RT: …

RT: ....

RT: Who is this?

WM: Hilarious. No, BF wants to move in. I’m thinking about it, but we’d need more space and I just realized that I can do that now. It’s weird. It might be good to not sleep in the same room as my kitchen.

RT: Always nice.

RT: Hey, I invited some of the other recruits in for some facetime around the time NG is coming in.

WM: NG?

WM: Oh, new guy. That’s fine. After today I’ll be around more often. 

RT: About fucking time. 

RT: While you’re in can you do something about the lights on the second floor? I’ve given up.

WM: Are they flickering again?

RT: Like we’re the set for a fucking horror movie.

WM: I’ll try. We might need a professional though.

WM: Pulling in at the station. See you in 2.

This time Hitoshi wore civvies on the train and carried his costume in the duffel. If he signed today then Tower had said he could use their vault to store it. He knew he was going to sign unless the offer was insultingly bad so he’d brought his spare charger and battery packs. 

He noticed the crime ticker was live when he arrived, but the big sign was still in drapes. The door was working though and someone had had painted the walls in the main level.

“Whaddya think?” Tower asked as he strode in from the back. 

“It looks nice. I like the dark wall behind the front desk.” Hitoshi replied honestly. “It’ll be better once the fumes air out.”

“You’re telling me.” Tower scratched the back of his neck. “Wish we could leave the door open, but that’s just rolling out the red carpet for idiots. We’re starting to get people cruising; just lookie-loos, but that won’t be the case forever.”

“Did you find any other patrollers?” Hitoshi asked. He didn’t mind rustling out the kind of low level thug that liked to haze new agencies, but those fights tended to get a lot of media attention.

“Yeah, I got some potentials coming in soon. Once you and Watchman get acquainted we’ll do some introductions, maybe suit up and find some trouble for a shakedown mission.” Tower shrugged. “It’ll depend on how well I think you guys’ll mesh.”

“Did you talk to Uravity?” 

“Yeah, that’s one.” Tower nodded with approval. “That other guy you recommended’ll be here too.”

Hitoshi hadn’t recommended Watchtower to anyone else, but he’d discussed the job in a group chat so ‘that other guy’ could be any one of his unemployed classmates. He’d just have to wait and see. Anyone in his class who’d made it to graduation would be a decent enough coworker and he wasn’t about to wreck the opportunity for them.

“Uravity is an excellent hero.” He said and looked around for his real objective. “Is Watchman here?”

Tower chuckled and waved him towards the back. “Yeah, he’s upstairs cussing out some wiring. I’ll show you up.”

The stairs were bare, but had been carpeted at some point. Someone had gotten as far as sanding the steps and pulling up all the tackboard, but hadn’t refinished them. There was another biometric door at the top of the stairs. Aizawa would approve of the multiple chokepoints. Hitoshi didn’t know how likely an enemy assault would be, but it was probably more likely in Jedha than most places.

Someone had put more work into the second level, which looked to be a big meeting and lounge space framed by what were either going to be offices or individual crash rooms. The floors and walls were done and someone had started hanging up big black and white prints of First Gen heroes. There wasn’t much else in there aside from draped couches and a ladder in the middle of the room. A man sat on top of the ladder with his shoulders and chest hidden inside the drop ceiling.

“Hey, Watchman!” Tower went over to brace the ladder. “You at a stopping point?”

“Just a sec.” Hitoshi froze as a very, very familiar voice floated out of the ceiling. “Lemme wrap this wire and I’ll come down.”

Hitoshi could feel his pulse pounding in his ear drums as he tried to convince himself he was wrong, but he knew the red sneakers Watchman had on and he’d been the one to wash those paint splattered cargo shorts with the torn knee last week. 

His entire body flushed hot as a familiar head of fluffy green hair emerged from the gap in the ceiling. Izuku ducked down to grab a grimy rag to wipe his black-streaked hands with. “Sorry, I had to replace the ballast in the…” His smile faded and his eyes flew wide as he came to the same realization Hitoshi had arrived at. “...Toshi?” He whispered.

“Toshi?” Tower echoed looking back and forth between them.

“Izu.” Hitoshi hardly recognized his own voice.  “This had better have been what your big romantic reveal was about or I am going to be so fucking pissed.”

“I… yes? I mean, this isn’t how I planned it, but...” Izuku squeaked. “What are you…?” He turned slowly towards Tower, who took a comical step back. “Hideo.” He growled in a voice no one would have argued with.

Tower seemed to be caught up in the middle of his own dramatic revelation. “Toshi… Hitoshi . Oh, shit.” He swallowed, pasted the biggest fakest smile on his face that Hitoshi had ever seen, and started to inch backwards with his hands up. “Hey, what a crazy coincidence!” 

“Hideo! I had a plan!” Izuku threw the rag at Tower and nailed him right in the face. “I bought candles!”

“I didn’t know!” Tower wasn’t even pretending anymore. He was a two hundred pound bruiser who breathed lasers, but he was ducking away from an eighteen year old maybe half his size threatening him with a dirty cloth. It became clear in that moment who wore the pants at Watchtower. “I swear, I didn’t fucking know!”

A loud chime sounded from downstairs and Tower went for it like a life preserver. “That’ll be the others. I gotta go let them in. You guys talk!” He bolted for the door and slammed it shut behind him.

“Oh, man…” Izuku jumped down from the ladder looking miserable. “This is not how I wanted this conversation to happen. I’m so sorry, Hitoshi.”

Hitoshi didn’t know how he was feeling. Was he angry? Was he sick? He didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. “Why didn’t you tell me? How long?” He rasped.

“How long what?” Izuku patted himself down until he came up with his wallet. He pulled out a familiar blue backed card and handed it over. “Do you mean this?”

He accepted it and stared at it. It had the same official holographic watermark as his own. The name line read WATCHMAN and the date of issue was…

Hitoshi blinked, read it again, and looked back up at his boyfriend.

“This was issued two days ago.” Right before he found Izuku having an emotional breakdown on his floor clutching an envelope like it was the only real thing left in the world. 

Oh.

Izuku nodded and took it back. “I wasn’t a pro before that.” He said softly and turned the license over again in his hand. “Did you know you don’t need to be a licensed hero to open an agency? You need a hero on the roster to get anything done, but a lot of the big Tokyo firms are actually owned by civilians.”

“You were a vigilante?” Hitoshi couldn’t see how. Izuku barely had time to sleep.

“What? No! No.” Seeing panicked Izuku flailing actually came as a relief to Hitoshi. The wobbly chin that followed was far less welcome. He sniffed and wiped at his eyes. “Oh man, I had a whole speech. I was gonna ask you to come up to the roof of my building and I was gonna be waiting in costume with candles so I could take off my mask and it was going to be really nice…”

That did sound really nice, like something out of a movie, and all at once Hitoshi felt cheated. It was better than being mad, he supposed. Still.

“Hey, hey…” He edged forward and cautiously wrapped his snuffling boyfriend in a gentle hug. Izuku returned the hug, clinging to the back of Hitoshi’s shirt. This was a Pro Hero? “You’re a hero.” 

That was only just sinking in. Izuku was a pro. They were both pros. His vague plan of blackmailing someone into hiring Izu on at the agency in a support role or maybe putting him through school had been blown away and replaced with the very real and surprisingly appealing  possibility of being able to form a Hero Team with his lover. 

“Holy shit.”

“Y-yeah.” Izuku’s watery laugh was muffled by Hitoshi’s chest. “Holy shit. It doesn’t seem real.”

“Why though?” Maybe it was a dumb question. He’d seen what Izuku’s future looked like. If he’d had a chance at something, anything better then of course he would have taken it.

Izuku was quiet for a while. “There’s a point that comes after you realize that all your dreams, even the safe ones, are being held out of reach when it becomes clear that you’ve got two options; give up or go after one anyway.” He chuckled low and without mirth. “If everything is impossible then you might as well go for what you want most.”

Maybe Hitoshi did understand. Hadn’t he done something similar? Life would have been easier if he’d settled for Shiketsu or Ketsubutsu. Neither school was a powerhouse factory like UA and maybe had better facilities for non-physical quirks. Maboromicamie had a quirk sort of similar to his and she’d excelled at Shiketsu, but he’d wanted to prove himself at the most distinguished level he could manage so he’d forged ahead at UA anyway. 

The increased difficulty curve had actually appealed to him. He’d thought that if he could cut it at UA then no one could ever question his credentials as a hero, not even his mother or father. That hadn’t quite been true. It turned out that his parents just didn’t change their minds once they’d made a decision no mateer what proof you presented them with, but he’d found a new family instead and had become a better hero because of it.  

“I… actually did try to go to highschool.” Izuku said softly. “It was one of those public schools. They let me get through the whole admissions process. My mom and I got uniforms and books and everything. Then on the first day it turned out that I wasn’t on the class roster. There wasn’t even a desk for me. The school office wouldn’t do anything about it. They said it was a clerical error and a teacher walked me off campus. He told me to try again next year, but the way he said it...”

He took a deep shuddering breath. “M-my mom didn’t believe me when I told her what happened. It’s not… it’s not all on her and I think I understand now why she thought the things she did. My dad… he did a lot of crazy stuff whenever he was around and left her to deal with the fall out afterwards.” Izuku explained. “I didn’t tell her about all the other schools I applied to. It was so surreal, I didn’t know how to explain what was going on. I was ashamed and part of me thought it was my fault somehow. I think she was cleaning up while I was at school and found this notebook I’d started; trying to figure out ways to become a hero without going through a vocational program. I never planned to skip it, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. I came home and had to tell her I wasn’t really enrolled. To her, it looked like I was lying. She was furious and upset. We had a huge fight about it and she said that if I was going to throw my whole future away because of a childish fantasy…” 

He went quiet, but Hitoshi could fill in the blanks. She’d told him to leave. Maybe it had been a bluff and maybe it hadn’t.

“Ok, but how?” 

Izuku nodded into his shoulder. “I wasn’t a vigilante.” He said as he pulled back to wipe his eyes on his forearm. “I had a provisional license before now.” 

Hitoshi felt like the questions were piling up under his skin with every answer he got. “You need a school sponsor to take the provisional exam and you need a provisional license to take the pro exam.”

Izuku just shook his head. “No, agencies can sponsor exam candidates too.” He explained. “They don’t really advertise it. It’s a sort of backdoor policy for legitimizing vigilantes. I took advantage of it. It’s, um, why I wasn’t at your graduation ceremony even though I really, really wanted to be there. They scheduled the exam for the same day. It’s how I got hurt.” He admitted that bit very quietly. “Tower was allowed to participate because it was a team thing and there was an uneven number of candidates. He used my shoulder to get over a wall.”

All of a sudden Hitoshi remembered Mic talking about Red Tower; the vigilante who’d suddenly gone legit and how odd it was that he’d opened an agency so late in his career after being underground for so long. He remembered Tower himself saying; Starting an agency was a means to an end. We were going to dissolve it once we got what we were after...  

He felt like he had more pieces to the puzzle in front of him and they were slowly coming together. 

“You got Tower to go Pro and then mainstream.” He realized. “...but why?”

“We were testing a hypothesis, actually. He took the pro exam to see if it could be done. Watchtower didn’t exist yet, but he had enough connections to get another agency to sponsor him. I had more hoops to jump through, but first we had to know if it was even possible.” Izuku shrugged. “Once he was a Pro we opened Watchtower. It was a paper agency, but that’s all we needed to get me into the provisional exam. After that I needed a quota of documented field work hours to make up for not being part of a vocational program.”

This was insane.  

“Then why did you need to work so much? Pros make money!” He knew Izuku hadn’t been faking his jobs. Hitoshi’d seen him working. He’d visited Izuku while he was on the job(s). Maybe you could sneak onto a construction site and pretend like you belonged there, but bookstores? Restaurants? You couldn’t just blend in there. You needed keycards, uniforms, computer logins, and software training to get anything done. 

Watchman had been around for years! Surely he’d been getting paid for it.

The amount of work involved with balancing a hero career even at the provisional level with the amount of jobs he’d had hurt just to think about.

“Semi-pros don’t make that much. Actually, the government didn’t reimburse my hours at all. They’re supposed to be work-study students after all. Tower skimmed off his paychecks to pay me, but he didn’t have a lot to spare and I, uh…” Izuku scratched the back of my head. “You have no idea how much you overhear as a menial laborer. You have to make your own work in intelligence and I’ve come across a lot of leads by being a fly on the wall in public places. Tower’s been on me to build a network of informants though so that’s where a lot of my extra income has been going. CIs don’t work for free. I have an operational budget now though and I need to spend more time following up on the leads we already have so that’s why I have to quit my part time jobs.”

Okay, that sort of made sense in a terrifying over-committed way. He could actually see Izuku doing it even. He had a way of blending into a crowd. Hitoshi was always aware of him because you generally were when it came to your loved ones, but other people tended to dismiss him because he was plain and inoffensive.

It was dumb. Hitoshi knew Izuku was intelligent and had a knack for being able to draw accurate conclusions based on very little. Sometimes he’d wondered if it was actually a very subtle quirk in action, but Izuku seemed very sure of his own quirklessness.

Maybe they were all lucky he’d been too stubborn to turn villain. That would have been a very easy option for someone who’d been so thoroughly rejected from daylight society.

“How did you and Tower even meet?” Hitoshi was afraid of the answer.

“It was after I left home.” Izuku dropped his gaze. “I didn’t really have a place to go and I spent a while sleeping rough. Hideo found me getting mugged for my phone and took me under his wing. I slept on his couch for a while until I could afford my own space.”

That sounded sketchy. Tower didn’t seem like he’d had ulterior motives for taking in a homeless teenager, but Hitoshi was glad he did. If they’d never met --he didn’t really want to think about it.

“Are… are we okay?” Izuku wet his lips.

Were they? Were they okay? Hitoshi had to think about it.

“You didn’t answer one question.” He found himself saying. He knew that whatever the answer was he was probably going to end up forgiving Izuku. He didn’t know how not to, but he didn’t know how easy it was going to be. “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

Izuku’s lips thinned. “I didn’t tell anyone. Hideo knows because he helped me come up with the plan, but we don’t talk about it ever. I got my license on a technicality. The restrictions on who can apply to become a hero aren’t defined by law, just by the Hero Commission’s best judgment so they can make whatever rules they want so long as it isn’t so outrageous that people would start paying attention. The handbook doesn’t explicitly forbid quirkless people from becoming heroes, but heroes have lost their licenses before when the commission found out they’d lost their quirks.”

Hitoshi felt a little sick hearing that. He knew that the Hero Commission rules were weird and often arbitrary, but he hadn’t known they were able to just make them up unilaterally.

Izuku kept explaining. “The commission doesn’t track what quirks heroes have because they can’t guarantee the security of that kind of database. Give them credit, they take the private identities of the Pros very seriously. The public quirk registry is notoriously insecure and if someone was able to cross reference the two databases they could dox every Pro Hero in the country. They don’t even ask at the exams because there could be recording equipment there, but if word got out that a quirkless person was working towards taking the Pro exam it’d be the work of minutes for some concern troll to update their handbook. Then all they’d have to do to filter candidates was to make them certify that they had a quirk without specifying what it was.”

He paused, swallowed, and looked up to meet Hitoshi’s eyes. “It’s… you’re the only person I was ever tempted to tell. At first I didn’t because I was scared. I thought you might leave eventually. I’m not… I know I’m not the best boyfriend. I’m always busy and I’m not good at sharing the hard stuff.”

“Oh, bullshit.” Hitoshi shook his head. He couldn’t even pick a place to start pulling that argument apart. They worked. They were both busy, but they made time for each other even when it was hard. Would he ever find that with someone else? Did he want to? No, both times. “I wouldn’t leave you. If I didn’t walk out over this how could you think I’d ever?”

“I know!” Izuku’s grip on his shirt tightened, giving immediate lie to his claim. Oddly, Hitoshi understood that. Part of him was always convinced that Izuku was going to figure out he could do better. “I figured it out, but by then I realized it wouldn’t be fair to the other people I wasn’t telling that deserved to know.”

‘Fairness’ wasn’t a concept Hitoshi often bothered himself with. Even if he did, Aizawa probably would have beaten it out of him. The world wasn’t fair and fairness especially wasn’t for heroes. Heroes, according to his line of thinking, were there to protect other people from the fickle nature of reality.

Izuku was probably talking about his mother and Hitoshi could not make himself care about whether or not she was being treated equally. Whatever her thought process was or if she’d really meant to do it, he couldn’t forgive her for putting Izuku out of the house and he didn’t even want to. 

“No more.” Hitoshi struggled to put his thoughts into words. “I don’t care about other people. If we’re going to be us then I need to take priority so no more secrets.” Wait, that was dumb. Izuku was apparently the agency’s chief intelligence officer. There were going to be a lot things he couldn’t talk about. “No more secrets about you.” He corrected himself, reeling all over again over the fact that his boyfriend was a Pro Hero. They were going to be heroes together. “I-I won’t hold anything back either, okay?”

Izuku went bright pink. “Okay. I can… yes. I can do that.” He squeaked. “Does that mean you still want to work here? With me? Us, I mean? You don’t have to be in Intelligence if you’re not comfortable working with me. Hideo could be your supervisor. He likes you.”

“Oh, hell no.” Hitoshi replied flatly. “You are not sticking me in the same department as an aged-up Bakugo.”

“That’s, um, fair.” Izuku allowed. “To be honest, your job is mostly going to be yelling at me and Hideo is going to be in charge of everyone’s fitness reports anyway. So maybe it wouldn’t be too weird?”

“I want the job.” Hitoshi admitted. Their conversation had done one thing for him at least. He could finally see a niche for himself in Watchtower. His quirk and support weapons were ideal for quick, stealthy takedowns and personnel extraction. “I want the job as offered. I especially want it now that I know you’re out there spying on people.”

“I...um, wow. Negotiating your contract is going to be awkward.” Izuku leaned back and smacked his own cheeks. “Oh man, oh man.”

“That’s another thing.” An idea occurred to Hitoshi just then. It was petty, but it was the exact right kind of petty. “You better pay me top dollar because we…” He paused to point back and forth between them, “...are moving in together; no more arguments and I get to pick out our new place.”

“Okay.” Izuku’s blush intensified. “I already agreed, but okay.”

“No, you gave me a huge speech about the transient nature of childhood and avoided giving me a clear answer.” Hitoshi corrected him.

“...I was trying to say yes while giving you an escape route if you wanted it, but that’s fair too.” Izuku winced. “I’ll try to be better about that?”

“I would appreciate it.” Hitoshi would believe it when he saw it, but didn’t say so to his boyfriend’s face. Then, because he couldn’t help it, he scooped Izuku back up into another hug. That time he returned it with a grip that was just shy of crushing. 

It got a little less romantic after that because Izuku was in charge of new hire paperwork, which was deeply unromantic yet also necessary. Izuku’s office was one of the corner suites and only had a desk in it so far with two folding chairs. 

They dickered a bit over Hitoshi’s wage until settling on a number he could live with until Izuku marked it up 15% on the final draft of his offer letter.

“I was going to do that from the start before I even knew it was you.” He explained when Hitoshi put him into an outraged headlock. “I’m really annoying when I’m chasing a lead and that’s an apology in advance. Sorry, Toshi.” He paused, looking like he was debating his next words. “I also wanted to see if you’d argue with me if you needed to.”

That was… fair. “I can tell you no when I want to.” Hitoshi lied. He couldn’t. He could probably manage it in the field when there was actual danger involved, but not often in the general scheme of things otherwise.

“Looks like you can.” Izuku handed him more forms to fill out, walked him through an informational packet explaining their property damage insurance, and spent half an hour scanning his various biometrics to add him to the security system.

Hitoshi hoped they’d get a manager soon because he wasn’t sure if he could handle having his boyfriend be his field partner, his immediate boss, and his HR representative. 

It was a relief once all the contracts were signed and Hitoshi’s suit was safe in the costume vault because that was it. He’d made his choices and all he had to do after that was live with them.

“We should probably check on everyone downstairs.” That too was a lie. Hitoshi did not want to deal with more people. He wanted to go home and start looking at apartment listings, preferably with Izuku tucked into his side. 

“I suppose so.” Izuku agreed, looking about as enthusiastic. He shot Hitoshi a considering sideways look. “How do you want to handle this? Us at work, I mean.”

“Well, one of the recruits is Uraraka.” Hitoshi thought about it. “She knows our private identities are together so unless you want to go suited up in the office all the time, I think the cat’s already out of the bag.”

That got Izuku’s attention. He perked right up. “Ocha is applying with us!? Toshi, that’s amazing.” He bounced on his toes. “I’ve been a huge fan of Uravity since your first year Sports Festival!”

“Yeah?” Actually, it made sense. “I guess anyone who drops a ton of cement shards on Bakugo is a hero in your book.”

“Well, yes even though he still won, which was disappointing. She was super cool though.” Izuku shifted back and forth with nervous energy. “It would be weird to ask for her autograph, wouldn’t it? It’s weird. I shouldn’t. I want to though!”

“Where was all this when I introduced you to Present Mic and Eraserhead?” Hitoshi wanted to know. They started towards the stairs.

“I spent that entire afternoon and evening screaming inside my head.” Izuku admitted and let his knuckles brush deliberately against Hitoshi’s, who took the hint and laced their fingers together. Little by little, he came around to believing they really were okay. “Well, I was excited to meet Mic. I listen to all his shows, but I’ve worked with Eraserhead before. The glamor kind of fades a little bit after someone’s thrown up on you.”

Hitoshi stopped. “Wait. You and Aizawa know each other?”

More importantly, what had they been doing to make Aizawa lose his lunch?

Izuku shook his head. “Know is a strong word. I don’t think he remembers me and I would have been suited up anyway. We were both on a raid together and he got clobbered by someone with a stone manipulation quirk. He was a high priority target since the lead villain was an emitter. I was on support duty evacuating walking wounded. Tower was providing midrange fire support. Eraserhead wouldn’t describe his injuries so I escorted him off the field and about halfway to the fallback station… bleeeeh.” Izuku laughed nervously. “Anyway, that’s how we figured out he had a concussion. We weren’t introduced and from what I heard he didn’t start retaining memory again until after the field healers treated him so it’s probable that he has no idea it happened.”

The security doors obligingly responded to Hitoshi’s palm print. He was so pleased by that he actually didn’t notice anything was wrong until Izuku froze on the stairs. It took a second, but then Hitoshi recognized the gruff voice coming from the main level.

“...yeah, I know a guy. He’d probably take the job just to piss off his shitty old man; top five of Class A though so good fucking deal for you guys.”

“No way.” Izuku whispered. He turned a wide, betrayed look on Hitoshi. “Kacchan is one of the recruits you recommended?” He hissed as they both scrambled back upstairs.

“I didn’t! You think I’d do that to myself?” Hitoshi insisted, but thought about it anyway. “I… oh, hell. He was in the group chat when I was talking to Uraraka though. I told her Tower was Bakugo in twenty years. He must have gotten curious, but he already had a job with Best Jeanist! I swear he did.”

“Then…” Izuku frowned. “Hideo said both recruits already accepted their offer letters. That means he left his first job for us?” He rubbed the back of his head. “I’m kinda flattered. I wonder what the draw was? Best Jeanist is the current #4 nationally.”

“They had offer letters and you didn’t know Bakugo was an applicant?”

Izuku shook his head. “I just gave Hideo a template letter and notes for negotiating their salaries. They’re his people and I stayed out of the hiring process because I look fifteen on a good day if I don’t shave. Nobody would take us seriously.” 

He waved to Hitoshi to follow him. It turned out what Hitoshi had originally thought was a utility closet was actually where they’d put the security monitors. Izuku brought up the feed for the lobby.

“...take him if we can afford him.” Tower was in the middle of saying. He was standing next to Uraraka who’d perched on the empty reception desk. He had his elbow planted on top of Bakugo’s head who had driven his up into Tower’s ribs in retaliation. Neither of them seemed particularly bothered. “Can’t imagine we can match whatever Endeavor can cough up.”

“Endeavor is…” Urakaka considered her next words. “...he’s a lot better than he used to be, but I think Todoroki-kun would still appreciate getting some independence. I don’t know how bad it got, but negative habits are difficult to break no matter how hard you’re trying. He hasn’t accepted any offers yet because most of the recruiters seem to think he’ll act like a liaison with Endeavor’s agency or something.”

“Oi, we gonna meet the other guys anytime soon?” Bakugo shoved Tower’s arm up, but didn’t follow up with another attack. It was kind of weird to see him rough housing like normal people did without going in for the kill.

“Uh…” Tower coughed to hide his discomfort. “... to be real honest kid, I kinda just screwed the pooch on something. Watchman and Psyren are patching it up, but they might need some space. I don’t think we’ll see ‘em today.” He paused and added, lower. “In fact, if you do see them looking for me and they seem pissed then you don’t know me. You never even heard of me or where I mighta gone.”

Because it was Bakugo he said, “What kind of hero are you?”

“The kind who doesn’t like getting a boot up his ass.” Tower replied without heat and then sighed. “I probably deserve it though.”

Izuku and Hitoshi shared a long look.

“Wanna escape out the roof access?” Izuku asked at last.

“That is the best thing you’ve said to me all night.”

RT: Wanna explain why you bailed on me?

WM : You managed to hire both my boyfriend and schoolyard bully without me knowing.

WM: How? Musutafu is not that small?

RT : Your… aw, fuck. Seriously? Bakugo is fucking Kacchan?

WM: After a lot of personal growth and some medical intervention apparently.

RT: Of course you know about his implant.

RT: Yeah, he’s got Intermittent Explosive Disorder. He got diagnosed at UA. The regulator keeps him from popping off. He disclosed it in the interview and his known triggers. I was gonna ask about increasing our mental health coverage to cover more psychotherapy. 

WM: Googling it

WM: Huh

WM: Well that explains a LOT about middle school and elementary. 

WM: Do you want to keep him? It’s your call.

RT: He left a really fuckin’ good job to work here, kid

RT: Can’t say as I know why, but he did.

RT: Just said he had some stuff he wanted to work on.

WM: I’m okay with it if he decides he wants to stay

WM: You like him. Uraraka gets along with him. We’d be stupid to reject a top graduate of UA who meshes well with his team because he was a jerk when he was fourteen.

WM: We’re just gonna have to handle the ‘me’ conversation really carefully

WM: Pretty sure I’m one of those known triggers.

RT: Yeah, no kidding.

RT: Hey

RT: You and Psy ok?

WM: We are. I gave him the Cliff Notes version of why we started Watchtower. He wasn’t happy about being kept in the dark, but not all that mad. He still signed and made a few personal demands, but they were reasonable.

RT: Demands like what.

WM: We are for sure moving in together and he gets to pick the new apartment.

WM: Also we are getting a cat, apparently?

WM: Like maybe a lot of cats?

RT: Ok, that’s… really fuckin’ normal, but ok. 

RT: Not sure I’d have used my ‘get anything I want, no arguments’ ticket on cats and something you two were going to do anyway. You do you.

WM: He wanted an excuse to forgive me. He does that.

WM: We’re probably going to have this fight a few more times before he can lay it to rest.

RT: This is why I don’t date.

WM: You don’t date because you’re hung up on that single mom.

RT: WE DO NOT SPEAK ABOUT THAT

WM: Sure we don’t.

Hitoshi’s parents lived in a highrise condominium in Chandrila ward, which was the cushy gentrified bedroom community that served downtown Musutafu. It was a tall, glass-sided monolith and Hitoshi hadn’t set foot inside it in a year and a half.

Izuku squeezed his hand as they rode the elevator up. Tower had driven them out in a surprising show of support, but had been forced to wait in the parking lot with their rental car.

“Trust me, this is for the best.” Izuku had said. “He doesn’t like your parents. If he gets a chance to punch somebody, it doesn’t matter who, he will take it.”

It was kind of weird having that level of support from someone he hadn’t really known before that week; nice, though.

Speaking of, he hadn’t told Mic or Aizawa when they were going to pick up the remains of his stuff from his parents, but he wasn’t convinced they wouldn’t show up anyway. They knew he had a Friday deadline and it was Friday. 

“Do you think Tower would be willing to run interference if my… if Mic or Aizawa show up?” He asked.

“He already is.” Izuku winked. “Nobody wants this to get ugly. We’ll get in, get out, and then go decompress at a cat cafe or something. You know, I bet they’d like it if you just called them your dads.”

“Not this again.” Hitoshi groaned.

“Just something to think about!” Izuku held up his hands in surrender. “You know, while you have to deal with your unfortunate gene donors.”

“Ugh.”

Maybe he had a point. Whether his former teachers wanted that relationship with him aside, it would be a good thought to hold onto while he was back in that house.

“Hey, Toshi?” Izuku was shifting guiltily from side to side when Hitoshi looked his way. “If they start saying… stuff then I want you to let me handle it, okay?”

“I can deal with them.” Hitoshi protested.

Izuku had met his parents a grand total of once, but that one time had been enough to cement them as mortal enemies. They’d all ended up in the same cafe once; he and Izuku had been on a not-calling-it-a-date date a bit before the point where they’d officially gotten together and his parents had been out to get lunch. Hitoshi wasn’t sure what happened other than the fact that Words Were Said, but he’d come back from the bathroom to find Izuku sitting by himself looking uncharacteristically grim. His parents were long gone.

In the early days, Izuku had held out hope that Hitoshi and his parents were just having a misunderstanding. Maybe he’d been projecting his own situation onto Hitoshi’s, but he’d stopped trying to float the idea of reconciliation after that.

“I know you can,” Izuku was saying, “...but you shouldn’t have to and I don’t really care about what they think so it won’t hurt me like they can hurt you.”

Hitoshi was saved from answering or saying something he’d probably regret about Izuku’s mom when the elevator reached his parents’ floor.

“Here goes.” He said instead. 

The carpet in the hallway had been updated since the last time he’d been by. The building had swapped it out for gray and white marbled tile. Like it needed to be colder in there. His keycard still worked, which was a surprise. It probably wouldn’t after they left, assuming his mom didn’t make him hand it over.

Inside the condo was different too, which was less of a surprise. Hitoshi’s mom was an interior designer and owned a staging warehouse. Their place was usually furnished out of whatever was in style that year and the warehouse didn’t have room for. By that same token stuff would disappear if his mom decided she needed it for a project, whether it was hers or not.

For a second he dared to hope nobody was home. The genkan was dark and no one’s shoes were sitting in the empty tiled entrance. All the light in the living room came from the big picture windows that made up their exterior wall.

“Hitoshi?” A feminine voice called from deeper in the house. “Is that you?”

He let out his breath. “It’s me.”

His mom appeared a few seconds later. She looked much the same as she had the last time they’d talked face to face; tall, slender, and dressed in a well cut violet pantsuit. Her hair was shorter and a lighter shade of lilac than he remembered. She had on makeup, but just the amount she typically wore just around the house. Hitoshi could not remember ever seeing her without it.

“There you are.” She smiled as though this were all perfectly normal. Maybe it was, for her; a logical conclusion to their relationship with no need to be nasty about it --what she considered to be nasty, anyway. “You cut it close!” Her expression flickered as she took in Izuku standing just behind him. “Ah. Your… friend is welcome too.”

Her tone said his friend was not welcome too, but she knew she wasn’t getting out of it.

“Thank you for having me.” Izuku agreed much more politely than the situation called for.

“Well.” She turned and strode into the house. “Your father is out right now. If there’s anything you can’t find that you need him for then make sure to call by tonight.”

“I doubt I’ll need to.” Hitoshi murmured. His father didn’t really concern himself with domestic details, which was probably a good thing for him considering the way the furniture changed every few months. He was the type of high powered sociopath who did very well in business. He was a regional sales director for some place Hitoshi had never been very interested in and from what he gathered his father’s life was a lot like the first part of American Psycho before all the murder got started. 

If there was anything in the house that Hitoshi needed and he or his mother couldn’t find it then he’d have to do without.

Another surprise came when he went into his old room. He’d expected to find exercise equipment in there or storage. There were boxes, but they had his old clothes and books from middle school in them. Hitoshi crouched down and ran his finger over the top of one. His fingertip came back gray. That box had been packed a long time ago.

“Well, if I ever wondered if they’d expected me to come back…” He commented, “...I guess I have my answer.”

“I’ll take these downstairs.” Izuku replied neutrally. “See if there’s anything in the closet or your drawers.”

Hitoshi passed him the keycard and started to poke around his old bedroom. There was more there than he remembered; some vintage band posters that weren’t too sunbleached from the open window, a couple hero mags hidden under the mattress, his first (and to date last) pet’s collar, a medal from grade school for winning a spelling contest, and a small ugly All Might figurine he’d gotten from a Gachapon once. He put all that into the duffle bag he’d brought and then did a cursory sweep of the actual storage closet. 

There wasn’t anything there. He suspected his mom had done a sweep when he’d stopped coming home and contained all evidence of his existence in his former bedroom.

What had Izuku said? His national health insurance card wasn’t necessary. He had insurance through Watchtower now and would probably have to get a new card anyway if he ever changed jobs. The other thing was… baby pictures.

“Mom?” Hitoshi stuck his head out into the hall.

“Yes?” She called from the kitchen. She was making tea when he found her; a single cup. They were clearly not expected to stay long.

“Do you still have any pictures of me as a kid?” He felt dumb asking. This was inviting pain. Pictures weren’t a part of his life growing up. His parents didn’t appear as official functions like other people’s families did. They didn’t take pictures of him starting school or graduating. What photographic documentation he had of his own childhood came from school albums or when he appeared in the background of other people’s .

She thought about it, however. “I think so.” She said at last. “They should be on the bottom shelf by the television.”

Surprised, Hitoshi went to look and was abruptly less shocked. There were four little photo albums on the shelf wedged in next to his dad’s vinyl collection. The spines were labelled by year and stopped around the time his quirk manifested. 

That was pretty typical of his parents. Neither of them were naturally empathetic and Hitoshi wondered if they exacerbated each other’s worst tendencies. He already knew their marriage acted like an echo chamber sometimes.

Everyone in the world fit into three neat categories as far as Hitoshi’s parents were concerned; Heroes, Villains, and Civilians. What type of person you were was defined by your quirk. They didn’t have any illusions about their own; Hitoshi’s dad had Perfect Pitch and his mom’s was a predictive ability called Read the Room. Neither quirk was at all powerful. His dad’s voice was always on key and his mom could sense how people would interact with an enclosed space; useful for their work, but otherwise unimpressive save for the way they’d combined to create Brainwash.

His parents had classified themselves as civilians and that worked well for them. There were clear cut rules and expectations for a normal Japanese family; an easy progression from birth to death if you paid attention. They’d done the ‘right’ things; worked to get into good schools, got well paying jobs, got married, and had a child. 

It had all gone according to plan for them until Hitoshi came along and they’d made sure he knew it. Being the parents of a nascent villain did not fit into the order of their lives. They’d never replaced him, but Hitoshi thought that they would have if his mom had ever gotten pregnant again. Maybe they’d just figured out that neither of them really liked kids and Hitoshi made a good excuse to stop trying.

He opened one of the albums and inside was the standard collection of baby photos; baby Hitoshi asleep in the hospital, Hitoshi asleep in a variety of funny animal onesies, Hitoshi asleep in a lace-lined bassinet, Hitoshi asleep with a stuffed animal…

There were no pictures of his parents in the album at all, he realized. The pictures that were there were all carefully posed. It was the same in the second album, which was much thinner than the first. The third followed suit and the fourth only had a few portrait style pictures in it. 

Izuku found him staring at the last picture in the fourth album. It was a family group portrait and Hitoshi hardly recognized himself. No one was smiling or touching each other. He and his father stood on either side of his mother, who was seated in a wooden chair in front of a vague gray background. His hair was combed flat and he was wearing a little sweater vest with a starched shirt underneath it. 

There shouldn’t have been anything wrong with the shot except Hitoshi couldn’t stop staring at his own flat, emotionless gaze. He looked dead inside; not the way people joked about when they were tired or overwhelmed, but actually devoid of inner life. 

How did you do that to a four year old? Hitoshi didn’t like kids, but even he knew they were supposed to be happy little goblins at that age just discovering their own agency and getting into everything. 

‘No wonder people thought I could be an infant villain.’ He thought and closed the album harder than necessary. He’d looked like an evil marionette next to two vampires.

Most people who gave him shit about his quirk didn’t really think he was a villain. It was an easy soft spot that they could exploit. He had never used his quirk on a civilian person without consent after he’d gotten control of it, but there were other people; ones who’d made their decision about Hitoshi after they’d met his parents and talked to them long enough to realize how deeply wrong they were inside. Those people believed it and they were truly afraid of him

“Hitoshi?” Izuku crouched next to him. “Do you need to leave?”

“I’m done here.” He was more than done. He was ready to walk out that door and never look back. He shoved the albums in his bag. The odds that he would ever want to look at those pictures again were slim, but they were his and he was taking them.

Hi mom looked up from the magazine she’d been perusing while drinking her tea. “Got everything?”

“Seems like it.” Hitoshi wondered how this would go. This was going to be goodbye forever. His dad wasn’t even there.

“Oh, before I forget.” She retrieved a white envelope from the kitchen where it had been stuck to the fridge with a magnet. He hadn’t noticed before, but the envelope had his name on it. “There, that’s for you.”

With extreme reluctance, Hitoshi stuck his thumb under the flap and tore it open. Inside was…

He looked up to gauge his mother’s expression. No, she was serious.  

“You know what?” He turned to Izuku. “You were right and I was wrong. Take over please.”

Izuku took the paper from Hitoshi’s unresisting fingers and scanned it. “Ah.” He sighed like he was disappointed, but not really surprised. “There it is.”

“Everything’s there.” His mom didn’t seem to realize just how fucked up the situation was, which was in character at least. “Room, board, and tuition. We adjusted for inflation of course and the interest rate is pretty reasonable. We’d prefer cash and that would probably be easiest for you. Your sort is always so clever, but if you need to do a wire transfer then Daddy can work something out. Do you think you can have it all by next week?”

His sort.

His sort.

She was expecting him to steal the money. 

“You…” Hitoshi started to snarl, but drew up short as his boyfriend stopped him with a hand on his chest.

“Sue us.” Izuku smiled as he said it. There was something subtly different about the way he held himself and abruptly Hitoshi they were in the room with Watchman now and not Izuku anymore. 

“I beg your pardon?” She drew herself up in offended dignity.

“I said sue us.” He repeated himself slowly, as though talking to a small child or non-native speaker.

“We can certainly do that.” Hitoshi’s… he couldn’t actually think of her as his mother anymore, not when she’d just presented him a bill for his upbringing. She huffed and crossed her arms. “If Hitoshi is comfortable with that level of media scrutiny.”

“If you think he’s the one who would come out of that situation looking bad then this is going to be even funnier than I thought it would be.” Izuku held up the bill and snapped a picture of it with his phone. Unlike Mic’s phone camera, Izuku’s didn’t make a sound or a flash. It usually did.

Had he turned off the sound effects just for this visit? If so then what else had he been photographing?

“Children aren’t obligated to reimburse their parents for the cost of raising them. You’ll have a hard enough time making your case in front of a judge and that’s even without the blatant fraud.” Izuku turned the paper to show her. “You listed charges for time when he didn’t even live with you.”

She sniffed. “It’s part of the social contract. A child repays their upbringing by caring for their parents when they get older. Obviously Hitoshi will be in jail or dead by that point so it’s only fair he repays us now.”

She said it like it was a forgone conclusion and not one she’d ever lost sleep over.

“Not according to the law. So I repeat: sue us.” Izuku folded the bill, tucked it back into the envelope, and slid it into his pocket. “Personally, I can’t wait --especially when it comes out that you tried extortion first. That was what you meant, right? That he should steal the money for you?”

That barb flew true and hit hard. She recoiled from them both. “I never said that.” She said hastily and in a tone no one would ever believe. 

“No, you just implied it heavily.” Izuku agreed and gently herded Hitoshi towards the door. “We’re going. Have a good life, Shinsou-san.”

Hitoshi was numb and frozen until they hit the corridor, the door shut behind them, Izuku took a mini recorder out of his pocket and hit the ‘stop’ button.

“That’s probably not going to be admissible and I didn’t get a clear admission of malfeasance anyway.” He sighed, chivvying Hitoshi on towards the elevator. “We can use it to file an incident report with the police. It’ll be easier to get them laughed out of court if we establish a pattern of harassment now. That reminds me, can I get a screenshot of that text she sent you?”

“Did…” Hitoshi hardly believed he was about to ask, but; “...did you know she was going to do this?”

That stopped him. Izuku looked at him and shook his head sadly. It was Izuku too; his regular everyday boyfriend and not his strange boss. “No, I was sure they’d pull something just not what.” He admitted. “Your dad said something once about you being a long term investment. It was a while ago and I was hoping I was either wrong or that I was letting the fact that I really don’t like him influence me.”

“Also.” Izuku added after a pause. “I think that scheme was mostly your dad. There was someone hiding in the master bedroom. I heard the mattress squeak and you mentioned they don’t keep pets. They don’t have a leg to stand on and he’s the one most likely to know that coercion is a criminal offense. Threatening you with the media could also count a blackmail, depending on how a lawyer built the case. If he wasn’t ‘home’ then he could claim that he wasn’t involved.”

That actually sounded plausible; not only plausible, but in character. 

They’d need to check the math on that bill too although Hitoshi wanted nothing more than to throw it in the trash. Every time he thought his parents couldn’t get crazier they proved him wrong. 

“Let’s just go.” He waited until they were in the elevator to reach for his boyfriend’s hand. “Thanks.”

Izuku blinked at him. “For what?” Like he genuinely had no idea.

“For having your head in there.” Hitoshi leaned back against the mirrored wall of the elevator and tucked their joined hands into his pocket. It was going to be a while before he could let go. “When I couldn’t.”

Izuku was quiet for a while. “You got between me and Kacchan.” He leaned into Hitoshi’s side. “At the club. No one ever did that before.”

Well, of course he...

Hitoshi realized the point Izuku was trying to make. 

They rode the rest of the way down in contemplative silence.

RT: Not to alarm you

RT: but someone’s on the roof outside your window

WM: I know

RT: … and you’re okay with it?

WM: It’s Eraserhead.

WM: Present Mic was following me around earlier too when I was giving notice.

WM: It’s fine. They’re probably working up to a shovel talk

RT: Aww, empty nester syndrome. Fuckin adorable.

RT: Seriously though, I will roust him if you want

WM: Just come inside. The food’ll get cold if you keep pretending to loiter downstairs.

RT: 10-4

Mic and Aizawa were home and up when Hitoshi let himself into the house around mid-morning.

You wouldn’t think Aizawa would have been up, considering how late a night he’d had, but he was sitting at the kitchen table reading something on his tablet while he and Mic worked through a pot of coffee.

“Hey, stranger!” Mic grinned as Hitoshi went over to join them. “Did you find some time for us old people?”

“Well, I thought you might have gotten lonely.” Hitoshi set his jacket on the back of the chair he privately considered his. “Since Aizawa came over to visit us last night.”

Hitoshi had gotten lucky. Erasure was tied to Aizawa’s emotional state. He had control of it for the most part, but it still activated sometimes when something ticked him off and in the right conditions the glow could carry quite a distance. 

The dark space between Izuku’s building and the one next door wasn’t all that far either.

Aizawa didn’t react. He just took a slow sip of his coffee and set down his tablet while Mic face palmed, looking resigned.

“Patrolling, huh, Shouta?” He sighed.

“You don’t have a lot of room to point fingers.” Hitoshi met Mic’s gaze until he dropped it guiltily. “Izu made you. I made Aizawa.”

That was a minor fib. Izuku hadn’t spotted Aizawa, but his sophisticated counter surveillance system had right as Hitoshi caught a glimpse of two angry red pin pricks from the rooftop across from their open balcony. 

“Kid’s got good instincts.” Aizawa allowed. “Did you see the laser microphone?”

They had not, but Hitoshi couldn’t remember them talking about anything too sensitive. They hadn’t talked about Watchtower or Izu’s alter ego. In fact, all he could remember them talking about was the fall out of that disastrous visit with his parents and why the last season of So You Wanna Be an IDOL was garbage.

Well, that explained what had gotten Aizawa so pissed off.

“Don’t you usually spend the first week of summer break in a coma?” Hitoshi complained. “We’re dealing with it.”

“It sounds like your parents are blackmailing you into villainy.” Aizawa was a bit like a cat; not in the warm, cuddly, purring way. He was the kind of cat that stared at you for impossibly long periods of time without blinking and sometimes pushed shit over just to remind you he could. He liked you and all. He just wasn’t a comfortable sort of person.

“They’re trying to.” Hitoshi admitted. “Badly. Izu was there when they tried it. He basically laughed in their faces and dared them to sue. I kind of wish you’d been there. In retrospect, it was magical.”

It had been awful at the time, but his memory kept replaying the astounded look on his mom’s face and it got funnier each time. She was so used to being able to bulldoze her way through anything with a smile that her reaction to running up against his tiny, immovable object of a boyfriend was comedy gold.

“I’m glad that among other things your young man has experience as a lawyer.” Aizawa exchanged an impenetrable look with Mic. “Although, he seems to have fewer jobs now.”

Right, Mic had been tailing them. Maybe he sucked at being subtle, but he could charm birds down out of the trees if he wanted. It would have been the work of seconds for him to figure out what they’d been doing at each stop. 

“Yeah, he does.” Hitoshi couldn’t hide his smile at that. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand why Izuku had done the things he had. They’d talked more about the logistics of being a reconnaissance hero and a lot of it came down to money; support equipment, bribes, and occasional witness relocation.

All of that made sense, but Hitoshi still didn’t like sharing. Hero work would probably expand to fill all that freed up time. At least it would be work worthy of doing.

“Not gonna expand on that?” Aizawa probed. “You do remember that course we did on identifying and interpreting deviations in normal civilian behavior, right? Young man suddenly showing up hurt, quitting his job without another one waiting? That’s not ringing any alarms for you?”

“Nah.” Hitoshi took a moment to enjoy the mad tic underneath Aizawa’s eye. It was kind of nice being the one in the know. “I know what he’s up to. It’s fine.”

Izuku had given him permission to talk about Watchman if it became necessary during his contract negotiation, but it wasn’t necessary yet and he kind of liked playing information keep-away. It was a nice revenge for Aizawa following him around with spy equipment.

“If you say so. You know you can come to us if it’s suddenly not fine.” Aizawa frowned as Mic’s phone pinged.

It wasn’t the normal bell chime but a flat beeeep and Mic stiffened. He picked up his phone and sighed. 

“Well, there’s some timing.” He sighed and showed the screen to Aizawa who scowled.

“What’s up?” Hitoshi didn’t like the sudden mood shift. They’d been playfully annoyed before, but this was real unhappiness now.

Mic sighed. “Obsessed fan.” He explained. “...or anti-fan in this case. It happens sometimes when you’re mainstream. This one got my personal cell and email.”

“Is your agency doing anything?” Memories of their sessions on stalkers scrolled behind Hitoshi’s eyes. Legally speaking, they occupied the worst intersection between civilians and villains. They could hurt you like a villain, but unless they threatened your family or neighbors then you couldn’t defend yourself to the full extent of your abilities. Threatening a Pro wasn’t the same as threatening a regular person.

“No physical threat yet. No evidence of surveillance. Just nasty emails.” Aizawa replied shortly. “The police can’t do anything right now and no one else has time.”

Huh. 

“Do you want me to ask Watchman to look into it?” He asked. 

Izuku was between big cases so he’d have more time to dedicate to the renovation, but Hitoshi was pretty sure he’d make time even if he wasn’t. 

“It’s a little early for you to be asking your boss for favors.” Mic’s smile was way too sad to belong on his face. “I’ve dealt with this kind of thing before. It’ll be fine.”

Making a snap decision, Hitoshi lifted Mic’s phone off him. It was still unlocked and right away he realized something was wrong. The little device was running hot even though it was on the homescreen. 

The text message in question was basically an angry gibberish accusation of Mic being a ‘fake.’ Hitoshi spotted a few more texts like it from obviously spoofed numbers in Mic’s text history. The common thread amongst them was the word ‘fake’; fake hero, fake man, fake celebrity. They were really hammering that one word, which suggested this was a deliberate psychological attack rather than anonymous trolling.

Whoever it was had either lucked onto the one angle of attack that might actually hurt Present Mic or they knew their target. He was mainstream, yeah, but kept his private life very private. Even his most devoted fans rarely recognized him out of costume.

“Hey now!” Mic grabbed for it and Hitoshi held him off with one hand as he opened the phone’s task manager. There were no background apps running that he could see, but something was making the device work hard.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that ‘no evidence of surveillance’ thing.” Hitoshi said as he powered it down. He wasn’t a technological savant, but he knew a few things to look out for courtesy of his time locked in a lab with Hatsume. He gave it back to Mic before things got serious. “Something’s making your processor overheat. Don’t turn that back on until I say.”

“You think it’s hacked?” Aizawa’s hair lifted a few centimeters off his shoulders; the only evidence of his feelings on the subject.

“Maybe.” Hitoshi thought about it. Mic had a serious business Heroics-grade smartphone. There were a lot of security features built into it. It wasn’t invulnerable though. “You said there were emails? Maybe power off Mic’s computer too.”

“I’ll go.” Mic surprised him by getting up at once to follow his suggestion; no hesitation, no arguments, no patronization. They were taking him seriously.

Aizawa waited until Mic was gone. “Do you really think Watchman has time for this?” His hair dropped back down and he slumped back in his seat. “Hizashi’s more bothered than he’d been letting on. I’d owe your boss a favor if he can look into this.”

He kind of already did even though he didn’t know it, but Izuku wasn’t likely to cash in on that marker.

Hitoshi was already dialling. “I think he’s more interested in friends than favors.” 

Izuku answered right away. “Hey, how’d it go?”

“Watchman, it’s Psyren.” Hitoshi could almost feel the quality of Izuku’s silence shift. “Do you have time to look into something for my dads?”

No hesitation. “Absolutely. What’s the situation?”

Hitoshi outlined his observations and Izuku made thoughtful noises, but otherwise did not interrupt his report. It was kind of nice. He was used to his classmates and work-study mentors who sometimes had to be made to listen. This whole business of being treated like a competent professional was weird. He technically hadn’t even started work yet.

Well, Izuku had said they had to find their own projects. Maybe he just did. 

“Is that computer tied to your security system there?” He asked, once Hitoshi had run dry. 

Yikes. If Hitoshi understood what Izu was getting at, there was a possibility that the stalker might have tried to suborn the house’s surveillance system. Fortunately he knew the answer.

“No, they’re on an isolated system. There’s a network connection, but it’s more like a deadman’s switch. If the security system loses connection then a silent alarm goes off at the local hero agencies and police stations.”

“Good.” He could hear the relief in Izuku’s voice. “I’ll let Hideo know what’s up and swing by with a Sandbox to take a look at Mic’s phone and computer. Do you need me to come in costume?”

“Nah, we might as well stick with plan A.” They were already suspicious and Hitoshi knew Mic and Aizawa could keep a secret. Plus, if they were under watch then it was less weird for Izuku, Hitoshi’s boyfriend, to show up at the house than Watchman, unrelated Pro Hero. “I’ll read them in while you’re on the way.”

“Alright.” Izuku paused. “I won’t let anyone hurt your family.” He said softly, sincerely.

“They’d have to get through me first.” Hitoshi replied to hide the fact that he’d just been stabbed in the heart.

“Yeah, that’s what I worry about.” Izuku said. “I’ll be there in twenty.”

Hitoshi was not prepared to find Mic and Aizawa staring at him when he disconnected the call and turned around. Aizawa was still at the table, mug frozen halfway between his mouth and the table. Mic was standing just beyond the breakfast nook and holding the wall like he needed it to keep upright.

“...what?” Was all he got out before Mic swept him up into a bear hug.

“No take-backs, kiddo.” He rasped, barely audible and further muffled by Hitoshi’s hair.

Abruptly, Hitoshi remembered what he’d said. He hadn’t been thinking . Usually he could censor himself and keep his real thoughts private, but…

“I…” He tried to say something and got squeezed harder. 

“No take-backs!” Mic repeated himself only louder.

“Okay.” Hitoshi returned the hug and wondered how he’d missed this. 

Dammit, Izuku had been right the entire time. He was going to be such a shit about it.

Aizawa had gotten up from the table at some point and was watching them with the same soft look Hitoshi remembered from graduation. Hitoshi awkwardly opened one arm, inviting him into the hug. Aizawa didn’t take it but he did squeeze Hitoshi’s shoulder once, almost as hard as Mic’s hug. 

Then he casually said, with all the air of a cat casually knocking something expensive off the shelf knowing he was about to unleash hell and doing it anyway; “Dibs on Dad.”

Mic shrieked and both of them recoiled. “You can’t call dibs!”

“Looks like I just did.” Aizawa drawled and took a slow pull from his mug to hide his creepy grin. 

“Hitoshi! Tell him!” 

“Well, you’ve had an affectionate nickname this whole time…” Hitoshi did not try to pretend that he didn’t like pulling Mic’s chain almost as much as his husband did. 

Mic clutched his heart with his free hand, but did not release Hitoshi from his hug. “You used the plural, we’re both Dad!”

“How will you tell who I’m talkin to?” Hitoshi laughed as Mic pouted.

“We’ll figure it out from context or you can point.” He finally let go and pushed his bangs out of his face. “This is great. I don’t have to pretend to not hate your parents anymore.”

“You…” That was news to Hitoshi. “...you do?”

“Toshi, if I could get away with burning their house down I probably would.” Mic answered him seriously. “I never understood the appeal of villainy until I met those two. They’re awful and we tried to take you away, but… they weren’t awful enough or they were the wrong kind of awful. I don’t know. The judge felt they were doing enough and that Shouta already had partial custody of you through the dorm agreements, which gave you the option of sheltering here when you needed to.” He paused and grimaced. “We may have gone a little beyond that, but you parents were supposed to keep up with things aside from your tuition like clothing. Obviously they didn’t and we couldn’t just ignore it.”

Hitoshi abruptly wondered if it had been his parents sending him pocket money for the past year.

“You don’t have to pretend to like them. Nobody else does.” Hitoshi was pretty sure his mom was afraid of Izuku. 

“Well, we were afraid you still wanted them.” Mic admitted. “It’s a natural impulse even when your parents aren’t good for you and we didn’t want you or anyone else to think we were trying to alienate you from them.”

“No danger of that. They did it themselves.” Hitoshi’s tone didn’t really match his words. He felt light; buoyant, even. He wanted to call Izuku and tell him…

His head snapped up as he remembered exactly what he was supposed to be doing just as the doorbell rang. 

“Huh, it’s Midoriya.” Aizawa comments, looking at the door feed through his watch. “Did you two have plans?”

“I…” Hitoshi couldn’t form words. “I’ll go…” He tried again.

“Watchman’s on his way, right?” Mic asked. “I mean, I heard that correctly? You should probably be here when he arrives, Toshi.”

Hitoshi managed a panicked nod before kicking himself. 

“I’ll let Midoriya know you need to reschedule.” Aizawa was already moving 

“Da… Ai…” Hitoshi tripped over his own words trying to follow. This was going to be bad. Worse, it was going to be awkward and once the dust settled he was never ever going to live it down.

Izuku smiled as Aizawa opened the door. He was dressed a bit more normally (for him) than the last time they’d seen him. He had on his usual cargo shorts and compression sleeve paired with the most obnoxious All Might hoodie imaginable. Hitoshi recognized it. It was the one with stuffed bangs on the hood. He was carrying a sort of suitcase looking thing that he held up for Aizawa’s inspection. “Hey, I’ve brought some equipment to look over Mic-san’s electronics.”

“Beg pardon?” 

Hitoshi did not give Aizawa time to ask anymore potentially terrible questions and herded him away from the door. “We got distracted! I didn’t tell them!”

Izuku, the jerk, just laughed. “They heard you call them dad, didn’t they?”

Of course he’d picked up on that and hadn’t said anything. The whole Pro Hero thing was adding a whole new dimension to their relationship and Hitoshi was still divided about whether he liked it or not. 

“Yeah, you told me so.” Hitoshi griped. “Get in here and tell me if Mic’s phone is bugged or not.”

“I did tell you so.” Izuku held out a hand to Aizawa. “We weren’t properly introduced before. I’m Watchman.”

Aizawa accepted the handshake looking like he expected to be bitten. “You.” He said slowly. “...are a Pro.”

“As of this week.” Izuku agreed and Hitoshi had to marvel at the way Izu was slipping answers into the short conversation to questions Aizawa hadn’t had time to ask. “I apprenticed under Red Tower before that.”

“Of course you did.” Aizawa closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and waved them inside. “I need more coffee. If anyone wants some, speak now.”

“Yes, please.” Hitoshi groaned as he shepherded Izuku into the living room, where Mic met them with his phone and laptop.

“This is a surprising twist.” Mic didn’t hesitate to hand over his devices as Izuku sat down at the chabudai. “Hitoshi didn’t tell us he knew Watchman personally.”

Hitoshi coughed and turned red. To give Izuku credit, he only blushed.

“It was a fluke.” He admitted. “I was in the cape closet during my apprenticeship and Hideo is my senior partner so he took point on hiring when we got the grant to expand Watchtower.”

Aizawa paused on his way in from the kitchen with four mugs of coffee, two in each hand. “You let Red Tower have complete control of recruitment?”

Good to know that given a choice between Red Tower and an actual eighteen year old, not even Aizawa thought Tower was the adult in the relationship.

“He also hired the kid who used to beat me up in middle school. I learned my lesson.” Izuku accepted a mug with one hand and opened his metal suitcase with the other. On the inside it looked like a laptop with the bottom half split into a keyboard and a docking port. He plugged the phone in and the screen lit up. “Sandy, do a diagnostic on this phone.” 

A string of green light illuminated the screen and a woman’s voice replied. “Scanning.” 

It took a second and then a window popped up with a report in plain text. It might as well have been in greek for all Hitoshi could interpret it. Izuku took his time reading through while making thoughtful noises. 

“Well, you’ve got a keylogger on here for sure.” He said after a while. That was bad. Present Mic coordinated a lot between other heroes, mainly via text. It was why he’d invested so heavily in his own digital protection. “Among other things. The good news is that the security hardware in your phone prevented the programs from transmitting what they’ve collected. I think only the original hack was successful and everything else I’m seeing are attempted patches meant to circumvent the phone’s security features so they could retrieve their data. That’s why it’s running hot; you’ve got a lot going on under the hood. Do you want me to clean it out?”

“Yes, but don’t you need all that...” Mic waved an unsure hand at the screen. “...to track down who’s doing this?”

“Maybe, but you need this phone for work.” Izuku tapped out a series of coded commands on the Sandbox as he explained. “At least one of your enemy’s goals is likely to reduce your effectiveness as a Hero. I’ll catch them one way or the other, but in the meantime my goal is to deny their victories.”

“You’re very confident for a new hero.” Aizawa observed.

“It’s not a very sophisticated attack.” Izuku replied absently. “Some of these texts have attachments. Do you mind if I look at them, Mic-san?”

“Go ahead.” Mic frowned. “I haven’t looked at any. I at least know that much.”

“Good. You’d be surprised how many people don’t. I’m only doing this since we have a Sandbox handy. I wouldn’t try it outside of an isolated system.”

He transferred several files from a directory that apparently represented Mic’s phone. The computer threw up several alarmed pop ups. Izuku ran the files through several arcane looking programs until he was able to open them safely. When he did, everyone at the table leaned away.

“Well.” Izuku zoomed in on the most recent picture; a snapshot of Mic, Aizawa, and Hitoshi all walking into the teppanyaki place together. He clicked on the picture and it flipped over to display the file’s metadata, which included the photgraph’s creation date. “We’ve got a time and a place. I wonder if we have a suspect smart enough to stay away from security cameras?”

They did not. There was a Lawson conbini located across from the teppanyaki bar and their corporate offices regularly complied with Hero investigations. Izuku had a few hours worth of security footage uploaded to his personal cloud on HeroNet in forty minutes by which point he’d cleared Mic’s laptop for duty. 

“Subtle.” Hitoshi commented as they watched a nervous guy with a dirt beard take a picture of him and his dads from behind. “What if he’s somebody’s patsy?”

“He’s probably just the first step of a larger investigation.” Izuku sighed. “It’s enough to take to the police though. They can open an investigation with this. Maybe it’s a disgruntled fan, but Mic-san’s a BFG. They’ll have to make sure it’s nothing and if they have to go that far then they’ll want to make an arrest.”

“BFG?” Hitoshi didn’t recognize the acronym.

“It means ‘Big … uh, Freaking Gun’. My quirk has a cone shaped area of effect and works best on groups.” Mic explained although Hitoshi very much doubted the F actually meant ‘freaking’. “I do a lot of media representation and coordination, but my quirk isn’t great for patrolling; too much potential for collateral damage and civilian injury. Instead, I’m on call a few times a year for building clearing operations. Sometimes I lead breaching teams. I’m good for clearing thresholds and transitional areas. It’s why I have time for teaching and my radio show.”

“There aren’t a lot of heroes in the region with that kind of ability and they aren’t called on all that often, but the Hero Commission is sure to lean on the investigators to make sure that this isn’t someone setting up for a big event. BFGs are high priority targets for terrorists, but that kind of prep work can get farmed out to smaller, local, and less professional organizations so you can’t look at our perp and dismiss the entire threat. Musutafu has seen an increase in villain organization in the past few years. It’s not an irrational fear.”

Hitoshi was kind of proud of Izuku as he talked. When they’d met that whole spiel would have been a creepy stream of consciousness mumble. At some point he’d realized the things he had to say were worth listening to.

“Holy shit, kid.” Mic looked at Hitoshi. “I like this one. You can keep him.”

“Thanks, I was planning on it.”

RT: We bagging a stalker tonight or what?

WM: We’re handing the investigation off to MPD. 

RT: You are the worst.

RT: If we’re not working find me something else to sic the puppies on

RT: They are chewing the furniture.

WM: I have some hot spots identified for Project Osouji.  

WM: Forwarding you a dossier. It’s not much, just a grow house. Local PD doesn’t have the man hours or equipment for a raid, but they know about it. Make sure Kacchan doesn’t destroy the plants before they get logged as evidence. 

RT: It’s about their speed. Got another new guy tonight. Giving him a trial run.

WM: Did the others need trial runs?

RT: This one is Shoto. Less of an ass than his old man, but I dunno how good he is at taking orders yet. Not a lot of positive experience with authority, that guy. Need to know if it's gonna be a problem and I’m having trouble reading him. 

WM: Do you need another target? Two fire users in a building full of flammable evidence isn’t a great combination.

RT: Looks like you got some good drone footage of the operation here. It’ll be enough for a conviction as long as we don’t burn the whole building down.

WM: Please don’t say things like that. 

WM: You’ll end up actually burning the building down.

Detective Ito was an imposing woman, possibly due to a quirk or maybe it was due to her palpable aura of irritation as she stalked towards them framed by the smoke billowing out of the burnt husk of what had once been an unassuming warehouse.

Hitoshi was glad he got to stand slightly behind Watchman. It was their first time out in costume and he wished it was for a better purpose than to collect their soot-smeared and abashed coworkers.

“Watchman.” She greeted his partner tersely and looked Hitoshi over with one gimlet eye. “I don’t know you.”

“Psyren.” Hitoshi introduced himself.

“This is my new field partner.” Watchman explained. It was harder to think of him as Izuku in costume. He wore a bulky coat and coveralls that disguised his silhouette. His hair was hidden underneath a stocking mask and brimmed hat. The most jarring difference came from the voice modulator hidden in his face mask. It was less sophisticated than Hitoshi’s, but it made Izuku sound older and more alien. Periodically it belched little clouds of steam out of vents located along his jaw. “I’m surprised to see you here, Detective. Your jurisdiction is in Aldera.”

“Used to be.” She agreed in clipped tones. “Then I got offered a promotion to Chief Investigator and heroic liaison here. They didn’t mention Watchtower was taking over Jedha until after I signed then they stopped taking my calls.”

“I apologize.” Watchman seemed genuinely regretful. “I would have told you if I thought the Chief of Police would try something like that.”

Detective Ito waved him off. “It’s fine. You two are the devil I know anyway.” She sighed. “You know, I feared the day you got your full license and weren’t holding Red Tower’s leash anymore. Nice to see my fears were absolutely justified.” Detective Ito reached into her pocket and pulled out a pack of Pianissimo Peche. Hitoshi watched in mild horror as she tapped out a slender cigarette, lit it, took a drag, and blew a cloud of weirdly peach-scented smoke angled away from them. He shut all his intakes and engaged his reserve air supply.

It was 2150. Who even smoked anymore?!

“Have my people seen the paramedics?” Watchman replied coolly.

“Yes, yes. They’re all fine. No casualties either, since I know that’s what you’ll ask that next.” She sighed. “I saw your reconnaissance tapes. Watchtower isn’t up for charges of investigative negligence. The only reason your strike team found the sub-basement is because the shouty kid’s aural support items picked up the sounds of machinery beneath them once they got through clearing the upper level. They had to bust through a wall to access it.”

“I didn’t get much of a report from Tower, just that there were people down there.” Watchman leaned to one side and watched a group of threadbare people, most of whom didn’t have shoes, being led from the wreckage of the building to a waiting van.

“They don’t speak Japanese, but one of them has enough Mandarin that we can muddle along. They didn’t know where they were. They were transported via shipping crate and then van. They’re not sure how long they’ve been here either.” Ito turned to follow his gaze. “Best guess is that they are human trafficking victims. Border Control will be taking over that investigation. The reports I got from your sidekicks suggests there was a sweatshop underneath the warehouse; processing and packaging drugs for sale. It sounds like it was mostly cannabis.”

“That’s an awful lot of people to service one grow house.” Watchman’s mask hissed and spat steam. 

“My thought as well. I figure there are at least two other facilities in the area, assuming they aren’t packing their bags as we speak or are already finished with their harvests. I’ve got a commission for your agency if you want it.” She paused and grimaced. “If you can get the property damage under control.”

“I was given to understand that the fire was started by the workshop foreman. A series of remote controlled fire bombs, wasn’t it?” Watchman slowly turned his masked face back to the detective. His stocking mask was unrelieved black and made it look like he had no eyes. “My team contained the fire and evacuated the captives. Even the foreman and growhouse guards are unharmed. Are you not satisfied, Detective Ito?”

This time she did blow a cloud of unimpressed smoke right in his face. “Save the creepy shit for someone else, Watchman. I got some rookies who need toughening up. You’re here to clean up Jedha, not burn it to the ground.”

She turned on her heel and stalked off towards a small knot of beat cops, who did not look happy to be the next people on her list. 

“We will keep that in mind, Detective.” Watchman called after her. “Please let me know if you learn more from the captives once a translator is found.”

Her only response was a backwards wave.

“Are all police contacts like that?” Hitoshi asked once she was gone.

“The good ones often are.” Watchman sighed. “If they’re too friendly then it's because they expect you to do their jobs for them. We are lucky to have Ito. She doesn’t buy into the myth that the police only exist to box up the villains that heroes capture. With her around more of the villains we collar will end up with appropriate convictions.”

Hitoshi had known in an abstract sort of way that not every villain a hero caught ended up in jail. In school, they’d told him that was the police force’s concern and his job was to stay out from underfoot once he’d transferred custody of his villain. He’d suspected there was more to it than that at the time, but getting confirmation the second he hit the ranks of working heroes was disheartening. 

There was more to learn from Watchman than Hitoshi had thought after the revelation that his boss was no more experienced than he was. They had come up to heroism very differently and that might be a good thing. 

“Understood.”

They found their patrolling department sitting on the curb, covered in ash and little streaks of blood. Tower was in the middle, looking cranky. He was flanked by Uravity and Ground Zero on one side and Shoto on the other. 

“Wanna tell me again how the showers are a lower priority than the reception desk?” Watchman asked as they approached. Weirdly, all the sidekicks -even Bakugo- sat up straight like a teacher had just walked in the room. Uravity actually started patting her hair before she realized it was futile and sat on her hands.

“Shut up. You can see reception from the street.” Tower groused. “What did the harpy want?”

“For us not to burn down anymore buildings. I would like that too, if possible.” Watchman looked over the assembled patrollers. “Barring that, I would like to get everyone back to base and cleaned up. I think dinner is on the agency tonight. Think about what you want while I call a car.”

“W…” Bakugo looked like he was short circuiting. Hitoshi had already snapped a picture, but after that he started recording. “Why aren’t you yelling at us? There’s a burning building. That fucking detective just tore us all new assholes over it!”

“Do I need to? Seems like you’re already aware of the ways things could have gone better.” Watchman turned slightly as he punched in their location in a ride-finder app on his work phone. “Detective Ito is going to be angry whenever you see her. Don’t take it to heart. Our insurance will cover the damages, assuming there is anyone to pay damages to. A lot of these buildings are abandoned or condemned. You saved the captives. You bagged the villains. Take the win, Ground Zero.”

Bakugo just kept staring at Watchman, clenching and unclenching his fists. It was hard to say what it was he wanted from the senior hero. “This ain’t a win.” He gritted out eventually.

It figured Bakugo was going to be the one to struggle with this. He liked clear and obvious objectives. School had been good for him that way. Real Life was going to take some adjustment.

Watchman put his phone away and went over to stand face-to-face with Bakugo. “You’ll do better next time.” He said quietly. “I have faith in you all. This was your first time out and the mission escalated without warning. Eventually you’ll understand how well you did. Property doesn’t matter as much as people do and tonight there are eight frightened civilians who are very glad you chose their safety over a crappy warehouse.”

Hitoshi stole a look at Tower’s face. He couldn’t have looked more like a proud dad if he tried, but he also looked like he was getting away with something. Apparently Tower had cast himself as Friend Boss on the sly and left Watchman the hilariously ironic job of being Dad Boss. Mic and Aizawa were going to have a field day with that. 

Detective Ito watched them from the corner of her eye as Watchman loaded them all into a van driven by a rainbow haired person in coveralls with a nose ring. Apparently Watchtower tipped really well because the driver gave Watchman a card with a scan bar on it that let Watchman hire them directly.

The showers at Watchtower were still mid-installation. Eventually there’d be male, female, and unisex units. For the moment, only the unisex shower was working so they had to take turns. The sidekicks cleaned up while Watchman and Red Tower disappeared somewhere to debrief and/or arrange for food to show up.

“Heeeey stranger.” Uraraka, being a fast bather, had gotten first dibs on the shower and so was already back in her civvies with damp hair by the time Hitoshi finished getting everyone’s gear secured. “How are you liking it on the Recon Team?”

“It’s good.” He replied honestly. “Complicated, but I’m glad I signed.”

She nodded. “I know, right? Watchman seems intense. When you guys showed up, it looked like something out of a movie; you guys just appeared in the smoke. Very Noir.”

The reality was far less sexy. They’d arrived on foot after taking the train to the agency. Watchman was a roof runner and Hitoshi’s scarves let him keep up pretty easily. They’d come in against the wind too so visibility had been total shit. It was good they’d looked cool, but if they hadn’t both been wearing filtration capable masks then they’d have made a very different entrance.

How Ito was happy smoking in all that was a separate mystery, but maybe chemical peach was better than the smell of burning wood and marijuana. 

“You like working with Tower so far?” Hitoshi asked in order to change the subject.

“Yeah! He’s friendly and has a lot of good advice.” She steepled her fingers together in a habit leftover from school. “I wasn’t expecting him to be so down to earth. I think Bakugo and Todoroki are already halfway imprinted on him like ducklings. He’s like a noisy uncle.”

“HAA?” Bakugo emerged from the showers with dripping hair and his civilian clothes clinging to him. “YOU TALKIN’ SHIT, ROUND FACE?”

“Not if it’s the truth.” Uraraka replied, unbothered. “Watchman was so cool though, right?”

“Eh.” Bakugo shrugged. “Cool doesn’t count unless the cameras are running.” His mouth jerked in a sudden savage smile. “Scared that detective though. That ain’t nothing.” 

Hitoshi was very glad he hadn’t removed his costume or mask yet so neither of them could see the way his jaw dropped.

“Pardon.” Todoroki stepped out from behind Bakugo with a towel folded over his forearm. “Is there a place for laundry?”

“There’s a chute behind the half door next to you. We’ll be working out a rota for who does the laundry.” Everyone jumped as Watchman’s altered voice came from the door. “Food’s here when you’re ready. Tower wants to talk about after-action reports in the common room while you all eat. Psyren? With me.”

“Yes sir.” Hitoshi was glad to escape and gladder to see the two delivery bentos underneath Watchman’s arm. Thanks to their early morning start with Mic’s digital stalker, he hadn’t gotten much to eat at breakfast or lunch when Aizawa’s police contact kept them at the station to go over all of Watchman’s findings. 

If things kept being like that he was going to have to start stashing meal replacements in his costume kit like Aizawa.

“Hey!” 

They both stopped on their way up to, presumably, Watchman’s office and turned to see Bakugo skid into the hall from the locker room. He was flushed and puffed up with what Hitoshi had come to recognize as Bakugo’s particular brand of nervous energy. 

“I need to schedule a meeting with you… sir.” The honorific was tacked on as a hurried afterthought, but might as well have been a full dogeza considering who was speaking. Not even All Might had ever gotten a ‘sir’ out of Bakugo where anyone else could hear it. “When you got time.”

“Not tonight.” Watchman regarded Bakugo for a while and the sidekick’s pink face deepened to red, but he didn’t pop off. “I can make some time on Wednesday. Come see me in the morning and we can talk.”

Bakugo nodded slowly. “Thank you. Sir.”

Watchman nodded and was quiet up until the door to his office closed behind them. Then he hit quick release on his mask and sagged against the wall. “What was that?” Izuku paused to hand Hitoshi one of the bentos and hauled off his stocking mask. Underneath he was flushed and damp with sweat. His normally puffy hair was flattened against his scalp except for a few frizzy strays gamely trying to spring back up. 

“I have no clue.” Hitoshi looked around for chairs and -finding none- sat on the floor. He knew he needed a minute before heading back out among other people. “Did you hear them talking about you?”

Izuku covered his face with both hands. “Yes! Why didn’t you stop them?”

“I like hearing how cool we are.” Hitoshi chuckled. “Although, after that we’re going to be stuck in the closet at work for the rest of history.”

“Ugh.” Izuku dropped to the floor next to him and cracked apart his chopsticks. 

They ended up spending the rest of the evening cloistered in the office, which was less cozy than it sounded. Izuku deployed a small fleet of microdrones out the window to do some thermal imaging of the neighborhood while Hitoshi cruised neighborhood chat apps to look for people complaining about squatters in supposedly vacant buildings.

He doubted the other grow houses would be in their same ward, but then again criminals weren’t always smart. 

Still, this wasn’t so bad. 

RT: Did GZ ask you for a meet?

WM: Yes. What’s that about?

RT: Not sure. 

RT: We did a rundown of our current roster during the first team meet up. Who’s who and can do what. It came up that you don’t use your quirk.

RT: Kid got real curious after that. Asked a lot of questions pretending they weren’t questions.

WM: Interesting.

WM: He was very respectful when he asked for a meeting.

RT: Good.

RT: You gonna tell him?

WM: I’m going to have to. I’m not going masked in the office for the rest of my career and he seems like he’s gonna stick around otherwise.

WM: Plus I know Uraraka socially so that clock is ticking too.

WM: So, Ito.

RT: Don’t fucking start

WM: I just want to know what she said. I haven’t missed one of her screeds in years. She calmed down by the time I showed up and I’m a little disappointed. 

RT: She called me a blight on civilization and her personal recurring nightmare. 

WM: That’s almost tame. 

WM: For her.

RT: Didn’t get a lot of time to work herself up. She called the sidekicks my new ‘disaster ducklings’ and then GZ started yelling back. 

RT: Gonna need to work on that before we start getting cameras around here.

RT: It’d be fucking hilarious to see him pop off on the evening news, don’t get me wrong, but as an adult I should probably do something about it.

RT: Also, Ito likes you. The worst thing she ever called you was a disappointment of a babysitter.

RT: Any movement on the other cultivation sites?

WM: I found where one used to be. Looks like they harvested their crop and abandoned the site. I did pin down the spot where they patched into the city water though so that’s been reported. I sent word to Nighteye Agency and BlackOps. They’ll keep their eyes peeled and kick us back a finders fee if they get a hit.

RT: Whatever pays the bills.

RT: Where you gonna be at tonight?

WM: With BF and his parents. He called them Dads in their hearing and now they’re leaning on us to stay over more. 

RT: ‘Us’? Like both of you specifically?

WM: Yes. Don’t make it weird. It’s already weird.

WM: Cat-dad keeps casually mentioning stuff like how he once saw a guy get stabbed a block away from my apartment. 

WM: Bird-dad went straight to bribery. If I convince BF to keep living at home, he’ll get us VIP passes to Hero Con. I’m actually tempted.

RT: The in-laws like you

RT: Fuckin precious

RT: Do me a favor

RT: If Eraser starts running his big fat mouth tell him to shut up

RT: He thinks he knows something 

RT: He does not. He’s full of shit.

WM: Is this about that call you got today?

RT: Of course you know about that

RT : How? I took it in the quiet room. The soundproofed quiet room.

WM: Kacchan saw you stomp off to go take it and told Uraraka who told BF who told me. 

RT: …

RT: Occurs to me  shouldn’t have hired a bunch of gossipy-ass teenagers who are all friends already.

WM: I tried to tell you

“I can’t believe Tower is the person you’re always texting.” Hitoshi watched Izuku roll his eyes at his latest text and then stow his phone. They were lazing around the living room after dinner. Hitoshi and Izuku had cooked and Mic was dealing with the dishes. Aizawa had a patrol later in the evening and was preparing for it by refusing to move a muscle except to turn the page on his ereader. “I used to be jealous of him.”

Izuku made a face at him. “Toshi, no, ew.” He said. “He’s basically my dad.”

AIzawa made a thoughtful noise and Mic leaned out of the kitchen to point a soapy spoon at him and say, “Shouta, no.”

Unfortunately, telling Aizawa ‘no’ was the equivalent of waving a red flag at a bull and he set his tablet down to give Izuku a measuring look. “How well do you know Red Tower?” He asked. 

Izuku sighed. “You know, Eraser, I get alerts when people do background checks on me right? I know you’ve been checking around so you don’t have to try and subtly work it into conversation.”

Aizawa shrugged in a silent little ‘touché’. Oh no, they were bonding . “How do you know he’s not your father? As far as I can tell no one’s seen Midoriya Hisashi in fifteen years.” He took a poorly timed sip of his coffee. “Whoever is sending your mother money is doing it from a Japanese account despite the fact that he’s ‘working overseas’.”

“Because Hideo’s my uncle.” Izuku replied and dodged Aizawa’s spit take. “He thinks I don’t know so quit messing with him.”

“Your uncle?” Hitoshi scrunched his face trying to picture it. Tower was tall, angular, and possibly bald under his half mask, although no one could say for sure because he didn’t take it off. 

“Pretty sure.” Izuku amended. 

Mic left the dishes at that point and came out to join them. “You don’t have to explain anything.” He said, finger flicking his husband in the back of the head. “It wouldn’t hurt Sho to mind his own business.”

Izuku shook his head. “I don’t mind. I just never had a reason to talk about it and it was something I thought about too. Hideo showed up really soon after I left home and I was -you know- concerned when he offered me a place to stay. He never tried to groom me or anything, but I wondered about his motives --especially when he was so gung ho about helping me become a hero.”

Hitoshi noticed Aizawa nodding a little in approval. Those last two facts were probably what had prompted that initial background check in the first place. Tower didn’t act like a pedophile, but then again they rarely did.

“I figured out pretty quickly that he keeps tabs on my mom. At first I thought they knew each other and she’d called him to look after me after we… had that last fight.” He cleared his throat and shook his head. “...but no. They don’t have contact and I don’t think she knows he’s watching. He’s not stalking her, but he’s got a clear security presence in her neighborhood.”

“You think he’s watching over his brother’s family?” Aizawa made a thoughtful noise.

“Something like that.” Izuku settled against Hitoshi’s side. He took the hint and put an arm around him. “My dad never claimed to have any relatives. I know he changed his family name at some point, but Hideo and Hisashi both have the same character for ‘Hi’ in their names. My dad breathes fire and he has slit pupils in the pictures my mom still has. Hideo has laser breath and scales like freckles. So their quirks and secondary mutations are similar enough for a blood connection. My best guess is that they’re either estranged brothers or half brothers. Hideo once mentioned his mom remarried a few times. He’s definitely the one who’s been sending my mother money. I traced that account years ago when I realized his income wasn’t matching his earnings.”

“That’ll get awkward if your dad ever comes back.” Mic observed. “Do you think they’re cooperating?”

Izuku huffed a mirthless laugh. “That’s unlikely. My dad is in an Australian prison serving a life sentence for murder as the International Villain, Dragon.”

Hitoshi startled. He’d heard of Dragon. Most Japanese people had because he was a national embarrassment; a serial killer, terrorist, and thief whose costume looked like an awful low budget replica of Masamune Date’s new moon armor. 

If that was true then no one could ever know. The press might not be able to find Izuku, but they’d hound his mother to death. Hitoshi still didn’t like her, but nobody deserved that kind of media feeding frenzy. 

That added a whole new dimension to what he knew about their split. Had she known about her husband’s alter ego? Did she think that Izuku, denied a chance at heroism, had turned to villainy?

“I don’t have proof, but I think Uncle Hideo is the one who caught him although the credit went to someone else. Dad left a few times before he vanished and he never sent money back those times, but the checks started around the time Dragon was convicted.”

“How’d you find out?” Was what Aizawa had to ask about that. “International Villains aren’t tried under their civilian identities.”

“He got unmasked on television and you can still find some footage online. My mom wouldn’t let me watch it when I was younger, but I saw a clip later on and recognized him.”

Correction, if Midoriya Inko hadn’t known what her husband was up to before Dragon’s take down then she sure found out about it afterwards. It might even explain why she was still married to him. Serving him with divorce papers in prison would lead the press and maybe Interpol right to her doorstep, but she’d been receiving money from her ‘husband’ so she couldn’t have him declared dead or claim that he’d abandoned their marriage.

It was a complicated problem and Hitoshi actually felt kind of bad for her. He also wondered if Tower had realized that by doing things the way he had, he’d effectively put that part of her life and recovery on hold.

Probably not.

The front door erupted in furious knocking. Aizawa checked the security feed on his watch and made a surprised noise. 

“It’s Tower.” 

Izuku sat upright. “Oh, come on! I ran myself through the sniffer twice before we came over!” He cried out in dismay. He caught Hitoshi’s confused look. “The audio bug sniffer.” He explained and then blushed as Hitoshi went from confused to concerned. “I don’t wanna hear it. Your dad followed us to my house with a directional microphone.”

Which… fair. Apparently that was just how their life was now. No wonder Izuku was so damn paranoid. 

Aizawa, meanwhile, was looking at Hitoshi’s phone which had been sitting innocuously on the table while they’d talked. He picked it up, popped off the silicone case, and held up a thin card-like object that had been stuck to the inside. “Found it.” 

“Aw, man.” Izuku wilted. “That was such a rookie mistake…” He groaned and hid his face with both hands in abject misery and embarrassment.

“Don’t blame yourself. It happens to everyone eventually.” Aizawa said as he got up to go answer the door. He patted Hitoshi on the shoulder as he passed.

“He bugged my phone?” Hitoshi was having trouble computing what had just happened. When had he even left it alone where Tower could get at it?

“It was probably that night we all had takeout at my place after we saw your parents.” Izuku guessed. “I should have been watching your stuff too. I’m sorry.”

That meant Tower had taken advantage of Hitoshi’s upset and the fact that Izuku would have been distracted because of it to plant a bug on him. Oh, it was on now.

“I told you to mind your fucking business!” Tower shouted as soon as Aizawa opened the door. 

“As amusing as it is that you think I care about anything you tell me to do, why don’t you go explain yourself to your nephew?” Aizawa waved him inside and shut the door behind him.

“You bugged my PHONE?!” Hitoshi started over the back of the couch before Mic caught him by the back of his shirt.

“No brawling in the house.” Mic shot Tower a look too. “Anybody. I will blow your eardrums out, don’t think I won’t.” 

“Don’t sleep, asshole.” Hitoshi warned him. “ Don’t sleep.”

“I ain’t scared of you, kid.” Tower’s gaze strayed towards Izuku, who was on his side in a fetal curl on the couch. “Hey, uh…Izu.” He stopped, sighed, and pulled his mask off. 

Surprisingly, he wasn’t bald underneath. Actually he was a lot younger looking than Hitoshi had assumed, given what Mic and Aizawa had said about him. Tower’s hair was shaved up the back of his neck in a fade, but the top was a bit longer; just enough that Hitoshi could see the beginnings of a curl to it. His hair was dark like Izuku’s, but shone reddish-brown where Izuku’s was green. His eyes were narrower, but Izuku hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said Tower freckle-like scales. He had two patches on his cheeks below each eye; four scales in a diamond pattern just Like Izuku’s. There were more along his hairline and around his ears. 

“I shoulda known I couldn’t keep this from you.” He admitted gruffly. “So I’m, uh…” He stopped and swallowed down his emotions. “I’m your uncle. Half-uncle. Your dad was my older brother from my ma’s first marriage. Pretty spot on with your guesses there. Musta got those brains from your mom, though. My side of the family’s more clever than smart.” He ran a hand through his short hair like he’d tug on it if it were only long enough. “Ah, kid, if you knew why didn’t you say?”

Izuku lowered his hands from his face. “You went to a lot of trouble to keep it quiet.” He admitted quietly. “I wasn’t sure about why and I didn’t know if I’d like the answer.”

“It ain’t because I’m ashamed of you.” Tower leaned over the back of the couch to poke him in the cheek. “You gotta know I think of you as my own son.”

A noncommittal shrug was the only answer Izuku seemed to have to give. He evidently did not know that. 

“It’s because of your dad.” Tower came over and crouched down so he was eye level with Izuku, who was still laying on his side: still either dead of embarrassment or trying to will himself out of existence. “We weren’t close or anything so I didn’t know he’d gotten married or that they’d had you. I wasn’t the one who caught him, but I did inform on him to the team who did. I was working as a Pro in Queensland and he’d call sometimes to taunt me with the shit he did. We didn’t find out about you or your mom until after he was in custody and running his mouth to Interpol. After that, it was all damage control. It was pretty clear that you and your mom weren’t involved in what he did. He… he wasn’t ever gonna come back, kid. His villain career started about a year or so after he married your mom and that’s the last time we have any record of her having contact with him. Interpol wasn’t interested in pursuing her, but we had to make sure the press didn’t find out about you two.”

“Wait.” Izuku pushed himself upright. He still looked like he wanted to run and hide, but was holding it together. “Who is ‘we’?”

“Aaah… shit. Yeah.” Tower winced. “Me an’ Ryukyu; Tatsuma Ryuko. She’s my cousin on Ma’s side and helped me get set up in Japan. Think she’s your first cousin, once removed or something. Twice removed?”

“Ryukyu?” Izuku echoed, disbelieving. “Number 10 Pro Hero, Ryukyu. Second highest ranked female Hero in Japan, Ryukyu. You’re related to her and you were a vigilante in Aldera, working as a pizza delivery guy?”

Tower grimaced. “That was just a cover. Believe it or not, kid, I used to be pretty noteworthy myself --but the press found out I was related to Dragon. If I showed up in your neighborhood then anyone who remembered me would start wondering why there of all places. I had to lay low for years until interest in Dragon died down, but I had investments from when I was a top earner in Australia so I wasn’t really living off my current earnings until recently. I meant to retire, actually.” He admitted. “I just… never could quite stop. If I saw something go down then my feet just moved without me telling them to. Got into bad trouble a few times because I waded into a fight without my gear or because I hadn’t kept up with my conditioning. Then when we met face-to-face and I heard you talk about feeling the same thing. I realized you were like me. You probably couldn’t stop, even if you wanted. So I decided I was gonna help you become a hero. It was the only way you wouldn’t eventually end up dead or worse.”

“Why did we need to make Watchtower if my first cousin once removed already has a successful agency?” Izuku pressed. “Why did I have to blackmail Gunhead into endorsing you for the Pro Exam?”

Mic looked up at that last bit and asked, “Wait, you what?” No one paid him any mind, not even his own husband.

“She’s too high profile.” Tower said. “You were worried about the Hero Commission, right? Well, so were we; only for different reasons. You were too little to remember, but there was a solid year where any Japanese Pro Hero with even a vaguely draconic quirk had to make a public case for why they weren’t associated with your dad. Ryuko-chan isn’t the type to lie either. When they came for her she told them the truth and publicly condemned his actions. The only reason it didn’t hurt her popularity is because they never really knew each other and she was part of the crew that bagged him. Apprenticing you under her was our emergency fallback plan and we couldn’t risk connecting the two of you too early. The Commission says they don’t keep records, but the board members have long memories. They’ll figure out who you are eventually, but it’ll be harder for them to do anything about it if you have a solid catalog of closed cases by then.”

He paused, swallowed, and scratched his head. “Uh, if you know that much then she’s gonna want to meet you.” He admitted. “Actually, she’s been wanting to meet you on the sly for a couple years now. Since that shit with Shie Hassekai. She wanted to say hi after the raid and I told her no.”

“Wait.” That was Aizawa, who’d been listening quietly. He pinned Izuku with a look he usually reserved for students like Kaminari or Ashido. “What did you have to do with the Shie Hassekai?” 

“Oh, I…” Iuku turned bright red, but Tower just smiled; slow, delighted, and carnivorously. Hitoshi had never noticed, but the man’s canines extended further back then was usual for an omnivore and from his current angle Hitoshi could see that he had multiple layers of them.

He was starting to understand how Tower and Ryukyu were related.

“That’s right.” Tower turned to look at Aizawa, still smiling. “You don’t remember that raid, do ya?”

Izuku smacked his uncle. “Hideo, shut up.”

Aizawa’s eyes took on a suspicious red cast and his hair started to stir. Still his tone was deceptively even when he asked: “You took a… what? Fifteen year old apprentice into an assault on a yakuza base?”

Hitoshi was ready to evacuate. Even Mic was looking alarmed. They’d both heard Aizawa like that; usually right before he tore someone a new back door. 

“Hideo was part of the assault team. I was on the support staff.” Izuku interjected although not without rolling his eyes at Tower. “They had me evacuating the wounded out of cleared zones. Fatgum gave me the greenlight because I had the field hours for it and I was in body armor.”

That was a little hypocritical of Aizawa. Hitoshi knew several first year student heroes with less field experience from UA who’d been involved in that assault, although no one had ever admitted to it in so many words.

Aizawa was back to looking at Izuku, but he had this crinkle between his brows like he was trying to remember something. “Body armor.” He said at last. “Wait, are you the kid who took a bullet for Lemillion?”

“Oh, that’s what you pick to remember.” Tower rolled his eyes. 

“Again, I had body armor on.” Watchman was bleeding into Izuku’s tone a little bit. “Lemillion was evacuating Kai’s prisoner and, through no fault of his own, can’t work in anything except a bodysuit made out of his own hair. Of course I covered him.”

That was to say nothing of the fact that Izuku, unlike Lemillion, didn’t have a quirk for those Quirk Destroying bullets to work against. 

“Against a gun. Have you ever been shot, kid?” Aizawa looked like he seriously wanted to strangle someone and it wasn’t like Hitoshi didn’t understand the impulse, but it was kind of funny to see Izuku make somebody else’s blood pressure skyrocket for once. “There’s no such thing as bulletproof armor.”

“My amour is rated for real guns, but you’re not wrong.” Izuku agreed in a maddeningly reasonable tone. “What?” He asked when he realized Mic and Aizawa were staring at him.

“Those were real guns, kiddo.” Mic said slowly.

“No?” Izuku looked at Tower, who had started to snicker, for help.

“They’re Japanese, kid. They think if it looks like a TV gun then it’s a real gun. Even the Pros. It’s not a bad attitude to have, mind you, just like we talked about. Guess I’m gonna have to do a session on weapons with the ducklings too.” He snorted some more. “Eraser, those were air pistols. How do you think they got so many identical weapons into the country? The quirk destroying bullets were modified ballistic syringes. They’re way too delicate to be fired out of a semi-automatic pistol, which is what I’m guessing you geniuses thought they were. Seriously though, you don’t remember anything else?”

Izuku swatted him again, harder. “Hideo, shut up!”

Aizawa’s cheek was starting to tic, which meant he did not and it was going to drive him bonkers until he found out what happened so Hitoshi threw him a line.

“You refused to self evacuate after you got hurt and barfed on Izuku halfway back to the barricade.” 

Mic bopped his fist into his palm. “Oh right , that concussion.” He turned his laugh into a cough as Aizawa glared his way. “It happens to everybody at some point, Sho!”

Aizawa sighed. “Well, it’s late, but I’m still grateful.” He bowed slightly from the waist. “Thank you. I appreciate your help.”

Izuku went from pink to red and only managed a squeaky little, “You’re welcome.”

Tower snickered and started laughing outright when Aizawa glared at him. “You, though, can get out.” 

RT: Am I still in the doghouse?

WM: No

WM: I spent two years worried you were a pedophile

WM: This is preferable.

RT: Wha t

WM: You got anything planned for the patrollers? I think I found a second active grow house. Psy and I are gonna do some poking around tonight. If it looks good, are you all up for a redemption round?

RT: Go back one topic

RT: I am not a pedophile!

WM: Yes, I figured that out. 

WM: Homeless fourteen year old me wasn’t sure.

RT: And you still went home with me? 

RT: Kid.

WM: My gut said no you weren’t

WM: My head said trust, but verify

RT: I can accept that.

RT: Also

RT: 1. The ducklings are chomping at the bit for a redemption match. GZ especially.

RT: 2. I want my team on standby while you guys investigate. I didn’t like those firebombs. They were too ready to torch their own product. If the mission goes bad then it’ll go bad fast. We got a whole team now. Let’s use em.

RT: 3. Ryuko wants to get together for dinner friday. Please say yes. If you say no she’ll be all dignified and understanding and secretly upset and I already feel like an asshole whenever I talk to her. Please do not make it worse.

WM: 10-4 on all counts.

By the time Wednesday rolled around, they had accounted for all the Jedha grow houses and had found a second processing center. Everyone at Watchtower was tired, but pleased with themselves except for Tower and Watchman who were stuck with the paperwork that would get them all paid. The good news was that they were all looking at a fat bonus.

Hitoshi was put to work reading resumes for management staff and had come to regret never having gotten to know anyone in the hero management program at UA. It could have been worse. In deference to Detective Ito’s rising blood pressure, everyone else had been tasked with installing new flooring on the main level and from the sounds coming through the vents, Uraraka -the only one of them with renovation experience- was about ready to brick Bakugo and Todoroki into a wall.

Ura: Shinsou. I need you to take Bakugo away.

He pushed aside his paperwork to reply.

Shinsou: Why me? I’ve got nothing for him to do.

Ura: What about Watchman? Can they talk about whatever it is early? 

Ura: If he gets in my face about how I’m racking the boards one more time I will launch him into the sun. 

It sounded like things were getting serious downstairs.

Hitoshi leaned over to poke Izuku in the side. They were sitting side by side at a folding table, which was standing in for Watchman’s eventual office furniture. It was better than the floor, which was what they’d been making do with before Uraraka found some curbside furniture discards and brought them into the agency. “Hey, can you make some time for Bakugo today?” He asked, fully aware of what he was asking. “Before Ura murders him and maybe me?”

Izuku blinked down at his forms and took a breath. “I… yeah, sure.” He stood up. “Mind getting him while I suit up? It’ll go better if I start out in the mask.”

“Do you want me to stay while you two talk?” Hitoshi knew it was the worst idea possible and clearly so did Izuku.

“No, that wouldn’t help.” He paused and chewed on his lip. “Maybe wait outside the door? And warn my uncle?”

Yeah, Tower would want to know that conversation was about to go down.

“They could do that, yeah.” Tower said, when Hitoshi brought the matter to his attention. “Or we could wait twenty minutes and let Chako-chan solve the problem for us.”

“Covering up the murder is not part of my contract.” Hitoshi told him flat out and pointed. “Go find something to do upstairs.”

“See, kid, I knew you could be bossy.” Tower, laughing, went as directed.

That dealt with, Hitoshi went to find Bakugo.

As Uraraka had implied, he was in the middle of fighting her about how they were laying the floor boards down. Some were lighter and some were darker. Uraraka apparently intended to mix the shades together so they appeared more uniform. Bakugo wanted to put the dark boards near the wall and the light ones in the middle and it had only been a few seconds, but the argument had already sapped Hitoshi’s will to live. Todoroki meanwhile had abandoned their assigned task altogether and was cleaning the sidewalk outside.

Smart man.

“Hey, Bakugo.” Hitoshi reluctantly waded in before Uraraka made good on her earlier threat. “Watchman has a few free minutes. If you still want to talk, head on upstairs.”

Bakugo actually looked down at his sweat stained shirt and baggy torn jeans. “Mother fucker.” He said and sprinted for the locker room. Uraraka was almost done laughing when he emerged -in impressive time- in a whole different outfit and his hair combed. It still stuck up, but anything was an improvement.

“Is that cologne?” Ura lost it all over.

“I’ve been working, asshole!” He hissed. “I smell!”

“Now you smell like sweat and Bvlgari Pour Homme. Good job”

“It’s Guerlain, Hamster Cheeks!” 

Yes, because that was the most objectionable thing Uraraka had said.

Bakugo had met Watchman like once for two minutes of conversation and a silent car ride. Hitoshi dearly wanted to know what had elevated Watchman to such lofty heights in the ornery teen’s opinion. Meeting with Tower sure didn’t rate a fresh shirt and neatened hair. All Might himself barely got common manners out of Bakugo.

Hitoshi followed quietly as Bakugo stomped upstairs with his eyes fixed straight ahead and his jaw clenched in determination. 

Come to think of it, Bakugo had already known about Watchtower, hadn’t he? Hitoshi didn’t care to check his chat history, but he kind of recalled that Bakugo knew about the agency hitting Musutafu’s municipal top fifty.  

Watchman hadn’t been around long enough to have fans ...or had he?

Still, watching Watchman’s office door shut behind Bakugo’s back was one of the harder things Hitoshi had ever had to do. He still remembered that scene at the club. It helped to know that Bakugo had basically been off his meds and even then had managed to grab hold of the reins of his temper long enough to extract himself from the situation, but that had been a crowded public space. 

Tower stopped pretending to fart around in the security closet and came over to wait next to him.

The offices were semi-soundproofed. You couldn’t hear other people’s music or conversation, but shouting was audible. It was quiet for a while before there was a loud thud from inside and the door swung open.

Bakugo came stomping out, wildeyed, and tapping at his smart watch. Izuku stood, maskless and pale, behind his desk. One of the chairs lay on its side on the floor. That had been the noise they’d heard.

“Leave him alone!” Izuku ordered as Hitoshi went to intercept. “Ten minutes, right?” He asked Bakugo’s frozen back.

“Ten minutes.” Bakugo ground out. “Just… leave me alone for that long.”

That wasn’t a smartwatch, Hitoshi realized as Bakugo went over to the opposite end of the unfinished common area and crouched down so his head was between his knees. Tower followed, but gave him plenty of space. He looked back over his shoulder, caught Hitoshi’s eye, and nodded towards Izuku.

Message received.

Izuku collapsed into his chair as soon as Hitoshi closed the door.

“Everything okay?” Hitoshi went over and knelt by him. He could have gotten the other chair, but he was feeling petty and wanted Bakugo to have to pick it up later since he was apparently coming back.

“I… I think so.” Izuku didn’t sound too sure. “He wanted to know how I became a hero without a quirk to use.”

Hitoshi frowned. “Why the hell would he…?”

Izuku didn’t let him finish. “Because there was this kid he used to know who wanted to become a hero, but Bakugo told him not to bother and kept him from taking the entrance exam at UA. Not sure how he decided that was his fault, but whatever. Now he’s sorry and wants to make amends for being a big stupid jerk by giving that kid his dream back.”

That would have been around the time when Izuku would have had to take his mask off. Hitoshi bit his lip. Laughing was not an appropriate response, but the irony was delicious.

“I guess he didn’t know that kid didn’t ever listen to him in the first place.” He said instead.

“He’ll find out in about ten minutes. You guys were pretty occupied with the League of Villains when everyone found out about that admissions scandal. I guess it makes sense he didn’t connect the dots.” Izuku scrubbed his face. “How do I look?”

“Like someone set off a bomb in your office.” Hitoshi took a risk and kissed him. “It’s ok. You’re over the top now. It’s all downhill from here.”

There was a soft tap at the door about the time Izuku had calmed down for real. It was Bakugo who looked a little sleepy, but stayed upright. He must have done something with that regulator implant to forcibly calm himself down. He didn’t even shoulder check Hitoshi as they passed one another in the door.

Hitoshi waited in the common room, listening for the sounds of violence and looking at apartment listings on his phone. Tower had vanished downstairs once the imminent threat of explosions was over so he was by himself. He’d been a little optimistic, he discovered, about how much apartment they could afford. Musutafu was in the middle of a rental boom; at least the safe parts were. So rent had gone through the roof.

It’d be almost easier if they could buy, but part of getting ready to move in together had been an honest review of their mutual finances. They’d both be making good money, but at the moment neither of them had anything in the way of savings for deposits or key money. Places that accepted pets were even more expensive. 

It wasn’t that they couldn’t afford anywhere to live, but the one piece of advice Hitoshi had gotten time and time again from senior heroes was to be very sure about where he chose to put down roots. The more famous they got, the more enemies they’d accumulate, and the more difficult it would be to relocate to a secure location. 

So far Hitoshi hadn’t found anywhere he’d want to be for years and years even with the promise Izu and cats to sweeten the deal.

He was saved from his internet spiral by Bakugo’s emergence from the office. He still looked tired, but also like he’d exorcised a demon. Maybe he had; his past as an asshole preteen, perhaps.

“Someone’s coming to get you, right?” Izuku was saying.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll call Eijiro.” Bakugo replied gruffly. It took Hitoshi a minute to place the name; Kirishima. He was so used to hearing Bakugo call the guy ‘Shitty Hair’ that he’d actually forgotten his real name. That was bad. “I ain’t gonna try and ride the train alone like this. I know better.”

It sounded like he’d learned better, but Hitoshi wasn’t going to call him out while he was in that condition. If Bakugo was going to such lengths to work on his own problems, Hitoshi wasn’t going to get in his way.

“All right, take the rest of the day. Tell Uraraka and Todoroki they can take off too.” Izuku crossed his arms. “Tomorrow, though, give Ura a break. She’s the only one of us who’d actually done this stuff before and if she quits Tower will for real eat your heart.”

Bakugo just nodded and staggered off for the stairs. 

Izuku waited until they heard the downstairs door open and close before walking right into Hitoshi’s chest. 

“Can we go home too?” He asked, muffled by Hitoshi’s shirt.

“Hell yes.” Hitoshi groaned. 

RT: So…?

RT: Hey

RT: Hey

RT: Hey

RT: Hey

RT: Stop leaving me on read, punk!

RT: Do I gotta start recruiting again or what?!

WM: Hold your horses!

WM: I was eating. 

WM: MPD caught that stalker so Mic made hotpot for dinner. 

RT: Kid. They caught the guy two days ago. Jackass’s showing off so you two won’t be in a hurry to get your own place.

WM: It’s not a bad plan.

WM : We are both food driven, but yeah, I know.

WM: He just doesn’t need to know I know.

WM: We also haven’t told them Hitoshi’s the one making that call.

RT: ASSHOLE DID GZ QUIT OR NOT

WM: Kacchan’s staying

WM: And pissed at UA?

WM : Specifically the guy who signed the rejection letter. He recognized the name and was like ‘Oh, that dick.’ I guess there was a sexual harassment scandal and he was part of the coverup. I was assuming the person who blocked my exam application was too smart to sign their own name, but apparently not? 

WM: I think it was the guy Nedzu put a life ruin out on a while back.

RT: Heh. Good times.

WM: ...

WM: Do I want to know?

RT: Not over chat, no.

WM: Okaaay…

One of the good things about the way Watchman worked was that a lot of his preliminary investigative legwork was through drone cams and security footage shares. It was a holdover from when he’d had to juggle his investigations while earning additional income, but it did mean that Izuku had the infrastructure in place so he could work from the couch while Aizawa dragged Hitoshi out on a mysterious errand.

They didn’t go far. Mic and Aizawa’s neighborhood was one of the nicer areas in Musutafu and a nice place to walk; easy access to UA, convenient to the big district transit center, major Hero presence, and lots of interesting little green spaces. It was a shame the rent there was so far out their price range it was laughable.

If the past few days of staying over with his (Teachers? Guardians? Parents?) with Mic and Aizawa had taught him anything, it was that he definitely wanted to be nearby. He just also wanted to get laid again someday. Even if by some miracle Izu could handle the idea of having sex under the same roof as Eraserhead and Present Mic, Hitoshi was all too aware that Mic’s hyperadvanced hearing aids let him hear a fly fart on the roof next door. Privacy did not exist in the Yamada-Aizawa household. It wasn’t even an illusion.

There was also the issue of cats. Mic and Aizawa were between pets. Their twin senior rescue cats, Mie and Mau, had died a little bit before the beginning of the year within a few days of each other. It hadn’t come as a surprise. They’d both been at least twenty years old with health problems, but it had been sad. Mic was counting down the days before Aizawa came home with a stray kitten, but the main problem for Hitoshi was that Aizawa was as good with felines as he was bad with humans. They gravitated towards him. He didn’t even have to do anything. It was massively unfair and Hitoshi wasn’t going to risk bringing home a cat only to have Aizawa immediately supplant him in its affections.

Izuku had been right in one way. Hitoshi did want to have easy access to his found family. Izu was a part of that though. Hitoshi liked being able to share meals whenever everyone was in the house at the same time or just hang out and that’d be harder if he and Izu had to come in from the other side of town. So far though it looked like they were just going to have to make that work.

Aizawa stopped them on the sidewalk halfway down a quiet residential street. Hitoshi waited a moment for him to say something, but Aizawa just turned his gaze upwards and refused to say anything.

It occurred to him after a few minutes that they had stopped in front of a house with a for sale sign in the postage stamp-sized yard. It was a nice place and all; clean and modern with a tall stone privacy fence. The sign advertised it as a 3LDK where one of the extra rooms was a traditional tatami room. 

He kind of doubted that Aizawa meant for him to buy it. According to the sign the house had already been sold, for one. Was it going up for rent, maybe? Even if it was, Hitoshi doubted they could scrape together for all the deposits, fees, and insurance it would take to move into a place like that.

“What are we doing here?” Hitoshi asked eventually.

Aizawa sighed and dug in his pocket. He emerged with a key. “Yagi is retiring and moving into the Hero Alliance tower as an advisor or something. I bought this place off him cheap. It’s already got biometric security installed and a costume vault under the floors in one of the extra rooms. Hizashi’s been after me to pick out some income properties. We’re not getting any younger and I’ve already had two major injuries in the past few years.” He said, still not looking at Hitoshi. “No idea what it looks like inside. Knowing Yagi, it’ll be covered in his own face. Izuku might not mind that though. I’ll rent it to you if you want it. Might as well get tenants I like.”

Hitoshi’s voice stuck in his throat and he couldn’t help but stare at his mentor and father figure. Aizawa held up under it for half a minute before he cracked.

“If it were just me, I’d ask you two to stay in the house with us. There’s room and the company is great.” It was both eerie and flattering to hear Aizawa describe anything except sleep as ‘great’. “Only Hizashi never met a closed door he didn’t want to open and I know you two are probably doing… things.” He grimaced at the thought. “It’s only a matter of time before he walks in on something and gets traumatized. This is the best compromise I could think of. You boys start out with good security before Watchtower starts making the kind of enemies who try and follow you home. Hizashi gets off my back about passive income. We’re all a short walk away so we can keep seeing one another and Hizashi has another closet to sneak clothes into.”

That last bit got a laugh out of Hitoshi. “Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck to distract himself from the warm feeling in his chest. “Okay. Let’s take a look.”

“If it’s awful, I warned you.” Aizawa sighed.

It was not awful. The floors were dark, shiny hardwood and the walls were newly painted all in matte white paint. All Might had left behind the window treatments; cordless roman shades made out of cream colored tweed. Two of the three ‘extra’ rooms in the 3LDK were bedrooms on the second floor. The master bedroom was situated towards the back and the windows were screened in by the branches of a tall white birch tree, providing privacy and a little natural light.

The bathroom was a state of the art masterpiece and also an uncomfortable insight into how All Might had to manage his cumulative health issues. Hitoshi could see evidence of where someone had uninstalled a bath chair lift, for one. 

They’d probably keep all the handrails and stuff, to be honest. One of them was likely to get hurt before too long. It was the reality every hero and pro athlete had to live with; injury and home recovery were inevitable.

“Hang on, I need to get Izu in on this.” Hitoshi pulled out his phone to share his location.Yeah, he’d demanded right of choice on their new place but that didn’t mean Izuku’s opinions were totally irrelevant.

They investigated the balcony and back yard while they waited for Izuku to catch up. The privacy wall continued around back and there were some smaller, bushier trees along the rear section that framed an ornamental pond. It was dry at the moment, but Hitoshi was already planning fish and water lilies in the back of his mind. 

He and Aizawa were examining the storage shed, which was big enough for tools and a couple of bikes ( very exciting) when Hitoshi heard someone coming out into the yard from the house. He started to call out for Izuku to come look, but realized very quickly that it was not his boyfriend joining them just yet.

“Sorry to interrupt!” All Might was wearing his large form. He was down to about twenty minutes a day after the Kamino Ward incident, which had been both a blessing and a curse in ways. The nation knew what had become of the former #1, but it also made it so All Might didn’t have to put up a front any more. “I got an alert when you two went inside and realized I hadn’t taken myself off the security system.”

“You better not have jumped here.” Aizawa warned him although it was pretty obvious he had.

“I was on campus and I do still need exercise.” All Might waved him off. “It’s good to see you again, young Shinsou! How’s the job hunt going? Have you accepted any offers?”

Hitoshi didn’t have to lie or embroider his answer. “I signed with Watchtower. It’s been rewarding so far.”

“Ah, I’ve heard good things about them.” All Might sighed wistfully. “It’s good to see young heroes taking on the parts of town that get neglected by the bigger agencies. Red Tower is a unique character, but he’s a good man to learn from.”

That was the first Hitoshi had heard of Tower knowing All Might. “Thank you, sir. I’m working with Watchman, though. Tower heads up the patrolling branch of the agency. I’m in intelligence and recon.”

“Watchman, you say?” All Might looked a bit more impressed. “I’ve heard even better things about him, but we’ve never crossed paths. He’s worked with some old friends of mine. They like and respect him. They’re not an easily impressed group either.”

Izu was going to lose his mind . Hitoshi had thought he’d go nuts over the idea of living in All Might’s old house, but meeting the man in person? Hearing All Might’s opinion of his work?

His boyfriend might well die on the spot.

“I think he’d be very flattered to hear that, sir.” Hitoshi said with complete honesty. 

“Haha, you think so?” All Might chuckled and rubbed the back of his head. He stilled and cocked his head. “Were you two expecting anyone else?” He asked.

“My boyfriend.” Hitoshi gauged All Might’s expression. He was an American and they were weird about gay people sometimes, even though the United States had been one of the early adopters when it came to marriage equality. It was two hundred years later and they still fought themselves about it. “We were thinking of renting this place from Aizawa-sensei.”

“Oh, very good!” All Might turned to direct his trademark grin at the sliding doors that let out into the backyard just as Izu opened it.

Something bizarre happened right then.

They both froze, staring at one another with nearly identical expressions of agonized dismay. Then All Might deflated with an explosion of steam, which Hitoshi had never seen before, and spat blood. Izuku meanwhile slammed the sliding door shut again. Hitoshi could hear his footsteps pounding away from them. 

“W-wait!” All Might choked out between coughs. “Come back!” 

“Hitoshi, go after him.” Aizawa went towards All Might only to be waved back.

“No, I’m following him. Please give us a moment.” All Might spat again, wiped his mouth with a grim look, and swelled back up to his large form before vaulting over the entire house and landing somewhere in the street out front.

“What the actual fuck?” Hitoshi wheezed.

What had just happened? Izuku had never run from anyone or anything in all the time they’d known each other. He ran towards things; the harder and scarier they were, the faster he went. 

“We’re going.” Aizawa echoed his thoughts. In fact, they were both moving already; legs engaged long before either of their brains caught up.

All Might had caught Izuku almost at the corner, which was impressive even considering how fast he was normally. All Might had a hand on his shoulder and Hitoshi was about to put on an extra burst of speed when…

...when…

...when All Might bowed. 

He did it deeply from the waist, arms straight out at his side, and it was the most Japanese mannerism he’d ever seen from the retired hero. There were a lot of nuances to apologies in Japanese and immigrants didn’t always grasp them. Americans especially had one phrase for ‘sorry’ and relied on context or tone to convey just how sorry they were. 

Then there were the words he chose. They could hear All Might even from half a block away. “Moushiwake arimasen deshita!”

‘I’m so sorry.’

Foreigners usually stuck with ‘gomen nasai.’ It was a reliable, albeit slightly informal apology. For the first time Hitoshi wondered if All Might really was an American. Musutafu was an oddly specific place to retire to. He’d always thought All Might had returned to be around his Alma Mater, but maybe…

Aizawa put a hand on Hitoshi’s shoulder to stop him. It wasn’t really necessary. Hitoshi could already see that All Might and Izuku somehow had a history and some ghosts they needed to lay to rest too.

They talked for a little while. It was hard to stay put when Izuku started tearing up, but he reached into his pocket before Hitoshi could do anything and pulled out his license of all things.

All Might took it and slowly started laughing. It wasn’t his usual boom, but a quiet wry sound.

Okay, that was enough. 

The aging hero handed Izuku’s license back to him as they approached and bowed again.

“Thank you for sharing this with me.” He said just as they got into earshot. “I have never been happier to be proven wrong. I-I would still like to discuss that other matter more later, if you are willing.”

Izuku hemmed and hawed and blushed. “I… I’m going to have to talk to my partner first. We’re a team.”

All Might winced. “I’d… prefer you don’t share anything we talked about with Red Tower. Please.”

That got a startled blink out of Izu. “Oh, no!” He waved a hand in front of his face. “I meant Hitoshi!”

“Ah, Aizawa and young Shinsou.” All Might noticed they had an audience that that point and started to back off like they were a pair of wild dogs. “I, ah, should probably get going. We can set up a time to take me out of the security system, right? Right!”

He took off before anyone could stop him and Izuku just stood there, staring at his phone.

“I have All Might’s private cell phone number.” He wheezed.

Hitoshi tried on and discarded several replies to that. He was getting good at biting his tongue, working at Watchtower. He settled on; “That’s great, Izu. Do you still want to look at the house?”

“Yes, please.” Izuku replied in the tiniest voice imaginable.

WM: Ok, so you can’t be mad.

RT: Kid, if you say that it’s like a guarantee that I’m about to get pissed off beyond recognition.

WM: I saw You Know Who today.

RT: WHERE.

RT: Did he talk to you?

RT: He talked to you. 

WM: It’s ok!

WM: He, uh, apologized actually.

WM: For, you know

WM: That.

RT: …

RT: It’s a start, I guess.

RT: Still gonna bust his teeth in now that I probably can.

WM: You probably can’t. He can still puff up into Muscles™.

RT: Shit.

RT: Ok, how the fuck did you run into Abs for Brains? Usually we see him coming a mile away.

RT: And weren’t you at Eraser’s place today? 

WM: Yeah, about that

RT : So help me if you went on a mission without anyone on standby I will lose my shit.

WM: No, Cat-dad hooked BF up with a rental. Bought it cheap from one of his coworkers who was retiring.

RT: Aw hell.

WM: You’re ahead of me.

WM: AM forgot to take himself off the security system and got an alert that someone was in the house. We ran into each other there.

WM: I’m surprised he recognized me, actually. It wasn’t really a big deal when we met.

RT: Kid, no. 

RT: Here’s the thing. 

RT : You’re gonna remember every heart you break.

RT:  It’ll happen eventually. Maybe you fumble a save or more likely you’ll uncover something somebody wished they’d never had to find out about. If you’re a hero worth a damn it’s gonna stick with you. 

RT : And that was a big deal, okay. 

RT: Maybe you remember it differently, but you were hanging on by a thread back then kiddo; getting stepped on by just about everybody in your life except your mom. Anybody who bothered to look could see it. I was scared out of my mind and didn’t know what to do or how to help. No one can keep getting back up forever.

RT: You wore your heart all over your face back then. There was no way he didn’t know you were asking him to throw you a lifeline. Maybe he thought no hope was better than false hope. I don’t pretend to know what it’s like being #1, but I do know I’d have lost sleep for years afterwards if I’d done to somebody what he did to you even if I thought I was doing the right thing.

RT: So yeah, he remembered you.

They didn’t go back to Mic and Aizawa’s place, which Aizawa had liked not at all . 

The train ride had been silent. They’d sat side by side holding hands while Izu texted unhappily with Tower. Hitoshi wanted to know what All Might had asked Izuku about, but didn’t trust himself not to ask if they started talking before they were in private.

Somehow Izu’s ‘one-room mansion’ was even tinier and shabbier than he remembered once he had their new place fresh in his memory. Even Izu let out a little wry laugh.

“At least I won’t have much to pack.” He herded Hitoshi over the the bed and crawled in right after him. They lay there quietly for a while until Izu found his words. “So, that was really… something.”

“The house or All Might?” Hitoshi was kind of stuck between two extremes of amazement; the fact that the perfect house had been dropped in their laps and whatever the hell had been going on with All Might. “I heard him apologize to you, but not what about.”

“Oh, that.” Izuku’s ears went red with embarrassment. “I, uh… we met when I was in middle school. I was attacked by this really gross mutant villain. All Might was the responding hero and I was going through this phase where I thought if I could get just one person to… to validate me, I guess, then maybe my dreams weren’t so hopeless. So afterwards I asked All Might if he thought that someone without a quirk could become a hero.”

Judging by the intensity of that apology, Hitoshi didn’t guess the answer had been ‘yes.’

“He said no?”

Izuku sighed. “He said no. I actually saw him run out his timer and go Small Might so I knew he wasn’t telling me ‘no’ because he was prejudiced. He’d been hiding that injury for years. He told me, some random kid, the whole thing so he must have needed to get it out. I’ve been sitting on that secret for years. Seeing the Kamino Ward fight was that much more terrifying, knowing what I knew.”

“So, your reaction to that was to go out and become a hero anyway; the first quirkless pro hero.” Hitoshi flipped them over so Izuku was on his back. Then he took his time kissing the everloving shit out of his boyfriend, who’d responded to being let down gently by the greatest hero in history with the most glorious ‘fuck you, buddy’ Hitoshi could imagine. “I love you.” He slipped the words in between kisses. “So damn much.”

He was going to have to get a ring. That was a really big realization for an eighteen year old. He’d been circling the idea for a while, but had wanted to see how they handled life without school in the way first. 

This, though, was a giant blinking neon sign from the universe saying: THIS ONE, DUMMY. Hitoshi wasn’t going to do better; didn’t want to even if he could. 

Izuku, though, had one more bomb for him that evening.

“All Might asked me if I wanted to inherit his quirk.”

There was a record-scratch noise in Hitoshi’s head. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.

“Ok, assuming it’s possible I’d say take it and run.” He replied. It was so outlandish he couldn’t even reject the idea. “It’s not, so that was a really cruel thing to say.”

He didn’t want to have to punch All Might and break his hand on the guy’s face, but it seemed like he was going to have to do it just for the statement.

“Um.” Izuku shook his head. “It apparently is? That’s one of the things he apologized to me about. He inherited his quirk from someone else. He said he was the eighth person to have it. Before that he was quirkless. Just like me.”

Wow.

That was a level of hypocrisy that even Hitoshi had not been prepared for.

“Seriously?” Hitoshi scowled. “Fuck that guy. Absolutely take his quirk, but block his phone number after.”

“You think I should? I’m not going to lose his number, but taking the quirk, I mean.” Izuku tucked his face into the join between Hitosh’s neck and shoulder. “What does that mean for everything I’ve done up until now? I put so much effort into becoming a hero without a quirk.”

“What do you have to prove though?” Hitoshi asked. “You’re a Pro already. You have an agency; a ranked agency at the age of eighteen. UA’s never graduated a quirked hero who’s done that. The only thing this would mean is that you don’t need to worry about the Hero Commission taking away your license on a bigoted technicality anymore.” He paused and smiled as something else occurred to him. “Imagine the look on Bakugo’s face the first time you Delaware Smash something in front of him.”

That got a snicker out of him. “Imagine Hideo’s face.”

“Oh man, I can hear the profanity already.” Hitoshi kissed the green curls just under his nose. “So, uh, not to be bitchy… but it is there anything else you haven’t been telling me?”

“Um.” Izuku’s tone was incriminating. “In my defense there’s a bunch of stuff I did, forgot about, and only remember later when it comes up?”

“Ok, I’m gonna need a promise that you’ll just tell me when that happens.” Hitoshi sighed and let Izuku roll them over onto his side. “You just did. I can tell. Fess up.”

Izuku gulped. “You remember how your dad stopped sending you money before?” He asked.

“No way.” Hitoshi sat up just so he could stare down at the boy under him.

“Yeah way.” Izuku tried for a charming smile. “I only threatened him a little bit.”

“A little bit.” Hitoshi echoed. “You scared my dad into reinstating my allowance and kept that from me?”

“In my defense it was when Aizawa had you guys doing those really sadistic urban infiltration exercises and you were out of your mind with stress on top of not getting enough to eat. I just… I’d had enough so I snuck into his office and waited for him to show up. I didn’t touch him. We just talked. He came around to my point of view.”

He didn’t elaborate on what his point of view was. No wonder Hitoshi’s dad had been hiding in the bedroom. It might not have been entirely a ploy to trick his mom into taking the heat if their blackmail scheme went south. He didn’t scare easily, but once he did he stayed scared. 

“Were you using your Izuku voice or your Watchman voice?” Hitoshi could guess which. He still got occasional chilling flashbacks to him saying ‘Are you not satisfied, Detective Ito?’ for no good reason except it had been scary, but also kind of hot.

“I have a Watchman voice?” Izuku looked scandalized. He’d clearly had no idea. “What does it sound like?”

“Deeper.” Hitoshi thought about it as he flopped back down, landing half on Izuku who made a pleased noise. “Like that teacher who knows what you did and has all day to wait for you to admit it. You switch up your diction a little too. Watchman’s more formal; uses bigger words.”

“Oh, that part’s on purpose. I want to keep people guessing about how old Watchman is. The costume’s designed to baffle my silhouette too.”

“I’d picked up on that part.” Hitoshi had noticed that Izu was a little taller and broader in costume. “Are you using lifts in your boots?”

“Slight lifts. I still need to be able to run. The hood peaks a little higher than my head and the shoulder armor is a little padded on top too. Most of it’s my armor, to be honest. I just expanded things here and there.” Izuku paused, thoughtfully. “I don’t know where to get furniture and I’m not sure I want to keep anything from here. I found most of it on the curb or for free in the newspaper.”

“Oh man, don’t ask me.” Hitoshi groaned. He’d been trying to avoid thinking about that part of them going from a tiny bedroom and a studio apartment into a full on house. “We’re going to be eating off boxes for a while.”

“Hang on.” Izuku sighed as his phone chirped and he rooted around in his back pocket. “It’s probably Hideo. He...” he drew up short. 

“What?” Hitoshi rolled over to get a look at his boyfriend’s face. 

Izuku had gone pale and showed Hitoshi his screen.

Mom: Izuku, dear, it’s your mother. Do you have time to meet up?

The phone chirped again with another incoming message, then a third, a fourth, and oh god Izuku texted like his mom. 

Mom: It’s nothing urgent

Mom: Or bad.

Mom: I’ll understand if you’re busy

Mom: I don’t know what your work schedule is like

Mom: Just

Mom: Whenever you have a moment

Mom: I’d like to see you.

WM: MAY DAY

WM: HIDEO HELP

RT: What? What’s the fuck is going on at 8 PM on a Sunday?

WM: MOM TEXTED ME

RT: Oh shit

RT: She ok?

WM: Like you wouldn’t know if she wasn’t.

WM: Or are we still pretending you don’t have a big sad crush on my mom?

RT: WE DON’T TALK ABOUT THAT

WM: …

WM: …

WM: ...

RT: Alright, FINE. I haven’t gotten any alerts from my AI cams, but they wouldn’t know if she’d gotten sick or something. They ain’t that smart.

WM: Oh no I didn’t even think about that

RT: Shit

WM: WHAT IF SHES DYING

RT: Fuck shit damn I made it worse

WM: She wants to meet in person!

WM: Whatever it is isn’t a phone conversation!

RT: Kid, no conversation between you two is going to be a phone conversation for a while.

RT: Where are you meeting? When?

WM: Yerbana park in my old neighborhood. Tomorrow at noon.

RT: Ok, so it’s outdoors and she’ll have to walk a couple blocks to get there. Did she suggest it?

WM: Yeah.

RT: Good sign then. Far as I know, nothing’s happened with your dad either. I get alerts.

RT: Maybe she wants to bury the hatchet? It’s been three years. All her friends’ kids just graduated highschool. That’s an inciting incident there.  

WM: Maybe.

RT: Bring Psy.

WM: What, in costume?

RT: In civvies. He’s bitchy enough to pull you out if things get ugly and you try to stay.

WM: Only you could make that sound like a compliment

WM: One problem.

WM: He hates mom. H A T E S.

RT: How can anybody hate Inko-chan?

WM: They haven’t met.

WM: He knows what happened now, but there was a while when I couldn’t talk about her without getting upset and he had to fill in the blanks in my story by himself.

WM: And you know what his parents are like. That was his basis for comparison.

RT: Fair

RT: Take him anyway. Wouldn’t hurt to have someone there whose only priority is you.

RT: I’m… I’m compromised, kid.

RT: I want you both to make up and be happy so I might not step in even if I should. 

RT: Besides, I gotta be Momma Duck. We’ve gone a whole week without GZ fighting somebody or Chako-chan decking him and I’m startin’ to get antsy.

RT: Either something’s brewing behind the scenes or he’s keeping his head down. Not sure which possibility scares me more.

RT: Never thought fucking Endeavor’s kid would be the bastion of serenity on my team, but here we are.

WM: I wouldn’t put too much weight on that.

WM: When he goes, he GOES.

RT: How would you know?

WM: Remember when we bagged Stain and there was that one student hero who went off on the Chief of Police?

RT : ... no

RT: No I would remember that. That kid was MY hero. 

WM: That was him. He’s the reason we had to give partial credit to Endeavor. 

WM: The burns, remember? He was a first year and I couldn’t give him permission to use his quirk. You gave me blanket permission to engage when someone’s life was under threat. Vocational program student heroes need permission every individual time, but he still backed me up when Manual sent me after Baby Ingenium.

RT : Holy shit. Still waters do run deep.

WM: He doesn’t remember me. That was when I was still running around in the green jumpsuit and before I settled on a name. 

WM: I may have said some stuff to him about half-assing his quirk. He had this hang up about using his fire and I got ticked off.

WM: And I might have also punched him?

WM: So maybe don’t bring it up in conversation?

RT: …

RT: KID

Hitoshi hated the park. 

He hated the fact that the sun had figured out that summer was on its way and subsequently beat down on his head like a hammer. He hated the fact that his shade tree was still too sparse to help much and he especially hated Aizawa’s stupid microphone because it had an incredibly narrow beam and Aizawa’d also lost the mount for it so Hitoshi had to hold the thing steady by hand, which was going to get old real fast.

He regretted not going back to the agency to borrow some of their superior gear. The parabolic mics looked dumb, but he could have set up on a nearby rooftop with a parasol and gotten better reception. Aizawa’s shotgun mic had less range so Hitoshi was stuck hiding behind a bush and hoping no one wandered by and asked him what he was doing.

They’d gotten there a little early and Izuku was sitting on a bench watching a duck pond, waiting for his mom to put in an appearance. She wasn’t late yet, but part of Hitoshi was waiting for the whole thing to have been some elaborate sting operation. It was dumb and paranoid, but they’d also been out of contact for three years. Hitoshi couldn’t help but worry.

 //I can’t hear anything!// Uraraka complained over the party line Tower had set up between their ear pieces. 

That was the other thing Hitoshi was hating about this whole affair. 

It was a slow day at the agency so Tower had asked to be patched into the audio feed and it was only a matter of time before Uraraka, Bakugo, and even Todoroki got curious. Hitoshi was speculating about that last one. Todoroki didn’t ask direct questions, but seemed to materialize any time the subject came up in conversation no matter where he was or what he’d been doing.

The ducklings, aside from Bakugo who already knew, had taken the revelation that Watchman was a kid their age pretty well. They’d had a briefing about it the day after Izuku finally told Bakugo the truth. Of course, they’d been confused about why he hadn’t just gone to school like a normal person. Tower and Izuku had decided to continue keeping Izuku's lack of a quirk secret, but fortunately the admissions scandal had targeted lots of kids with undesirable or weak quirks so they didn’t have to go into a lot of detail.

Ura was still making Izuku buy her drinks for keeping it a secret, but kind of understood once Hitoshi had pulled her aside to explain the whole Bakugo aspect of it. She was mostly sad they’d been robbed of a chance to go to school together. 

A lot of other stuff had come out, including Izuku’s rift with his mom and his relationship with Tower. Unfortunately that meant the ducklings were now really invested in getting Izu and his mom back together. Hitoshi wasn’t so sure himself.

Izuku had taken off his ear piece before coming out so he had no idea any of this was going and Hitoshi was seriously considering following suit. 

“That’s because nothing is happening.” He gritted out.

//I’m almost there with the camera.// Bakugo said and Hitoshi’s day somehow got instantly worse. Who’d said anything about a camera?

“Go the fuck home, Bakugo.”

Bakugo just jeered at him. //Aww, too bad, princess. I got orders from Tower. Maybe if Watchman still had his earbud in I’d have to listen to you.//

//Children, don’t think I won’t turn this operation around if you keep bickering.// Tower broke in. //Psy, accept the equipment drop from Ground Zero. Zero, quit bein’ a dick about it.//

They both made vague affirmative noises. 

For the first time in his life though, Bakugo’s appearance improved Hitoshi’s day. He showed up with the good espionage gear, a better transmitter, a sun shade, and a cooler bag of chilled drinks. They relocated to the poorly secured roof of a nearby coffeeshop with good sightlines. There was a light breeze up there too so Hitoshi felt less like he was going to die of heatstroke.

“We got movement.” Bakugo had the binoculars while Hitoshi finished set up and handed them over so he could take a look. “She’s the lady in the pink cardigan who looks like she might run.”

Hitoshi found he didn’t actually need the help. Midoriya Inko looked exactly like her son, except softer and rounder. They had the same coloring and those same round green eyes.

They also had the same awkward dance of ‘should I stay or go?’ She shuffled back and forth a short distance from Izuku, who surely knew she was there and had chosen not to put her on the spot by turning to look. 

//Aww, cute!// Uraraka cooed. 

Inko-san eventually got her courage together and went to sit next to her son. 

They sat in silence for a while, staring at the ducks.

“I… I’m glad we could meet up, Izuku.” Inko-san was clutching her purse in her lap. 

“Um, me too.” Izuku’s voice was almost too soft for the mic to pick up. “H-how have you been?”

“I’ve been alright, I guess. Not much changes for me without you home.” Inko-san didn’t sound all that convincing. “I’ve been worried that I’d never see you again. Katsuki-kun told me he saw you and that your number was still the same. I thought you’d disconnected it when the number vanished from my bill.”

Hitoshi shot Bakugo a look, but he was staring studiously at the camera screen. Robbed of his chance to make amends by helping Izu become a hero, he'd apparently decided to switch up objectives. No wonder he’d been keeping quiet at the agency. He was getting into all his trouble outside working hours.

“What else did he tell you?” Izuku sounded cautious. Hitoshi couldn’t really see the details of his expression through the binoculars or the camera feed.

“That you were doing really well for yourself and that you were seeing someone.” Inko-san replied slowly. “D-did you end up going to school?”

“No, I found an apprenticeship.” Izuku’s tone had gone tight. “There were some lean times, but my job is just starting to take off. I’m okay now.”

“O-oh. I see.” Inko-san’s head dropped. “I’m sorry, Izuku. I shouldn’t have said what I did. There’s things you don’t know about, that I didn’t explain to you, and I expected you to behave as though you did.”

“You mean about dad?” Izuku guessed. “I know about him.”

“You…” Inko-san squeaked. “...you do?! How?”

“Mostly I figured it out, but I also met his half-brother and one of his cousins.”

“A man and a woman?” Inko-san’s voice trembled and her hands flew up to her mouth. “Izuku, please don’t associate with those people. They showed up at the house after your father’s arrest and said they wanted to ‘take care’ of us. I sent them away. I didn’t want them leading you down that same path.” She stopped and asked, horrified. “Is that your job? Please, I know I don’t have the right, but please...”

//Kids, what you just heard is top secret.// Tower ordered them over the party line. //Forget you even heard it. If I even hear this as a rumor later then I’m gonna come for all your asses. Got it?//

Hitoshi heard mumbled assents echoing Bakugo’s quiet agreement. He didn’t look at all surprised. Then again, his parents had probably met Midoriya Hisashi at some point and they would have recognized the face under Dragon’s mask.

“Mom? Mom, hold on. Just…” He fumbled something - probably his phone- out of his pocket. “...what that the lady you saw?”

“I, yes?” Inko-san replied, confused. “Her hair was longer at the time, but I recognize her face --and those teeth.”

“Yeah, this is what she looks like in costume.” Izuku said as he swiped the screen on his phone.

“What do you me…? That’s... oh. OH!” Inko-san squeaked in dismay. 

“The rest of his family isn’t like him.” Izuku explained gently. “They really did want to help.”

“Oh no, I turned the garden hose on them!” His mother wailed and the last clinging wisps of Hitoshi’s grudge vanished as he fought not to laugh.

Bakugo clamped both hands over his mouth and rolled over onto his back, almost crying with the effort not to let his guffaws out. 

“Seriously, Tower?” Hitoshi asked.

//I went back a week later and she threw a shoe at me. Cussed me out so bad I actually learned some new words. She looks like a pushover.// He replied, fondly. //She ain’t.//

Hitoshi couldn’t hear the next bit over Bakugo’s stifled laughter and leaned over to kick him in the ass. It didn’t help but Bakugo retreated a little ways away to get a grip on himself.

“I-I do have one other thing I wanted to ask about, dear.” Inko-san asked as Bakugo got far enough away. “I was contacted by a lawyer a little while ago. They’re representing a class action lawsuit against the Musutafu Board of Education; specifically regarding children who were being illegally screened out of higher education.”

That shut Bakugo up. It shut everyone up.

“O-oh?” Izuku exhibited zero chill and Hitoshi could imagine his guilty little face in high definition. 

“They sent me a list of all the schools they had record of you applying to.” She paused. “It was more schools than you told me about. Izuku…”

“Did they send you a letter?” Izuku asked unexpectedly.

“I… yes?” She handed him something and there was quiet for a bit as he read it.

“I don’t think we can participate in this.” Izuku said after a while. He handed it back. “I’m the whistleblower so I’ve already been compensated. I sent you money for those uniforms you had to buy for Ryloth. Remember?”

“I-I remember getting it in the mail, but Izu!” She touched his shoulder. “You were fourteen. How…?”

Izuku turned to look at her and something about the set of his shoulders reminded Hitoshi of Watchman. “I was fourteen and really angry. I didn’t understand how that could have happened to me and I wanted to find out who was behind it all. Eventually I figured out I wasn’t the only person affected. A lot of those kids didn’t end up getting to go to school to school either. Some of them ended up hurting themselves. It took me a year and a half to get evidence. The school board ignored me when I approached them with it so I found a reporter and convinced them that another major outlet was about to run with the story. It ended up as one of my first big cases and helped me understand what I was good at and what I wanted to do with my life; not every villain shows up on the street firing a homemade laser gun into the air. Most of them have normal faces and normal lives. You wouldn’t know them on the street if you passed by them. The worst of them think they’re just doing their job and if someone or even a lot of people get hurt then it’s not really their problem.”

Even through the binoculars, you could see the moment the penny dropped for Inko-san. Her jaw dropped and her eyes grew wide. 

“Izuku…” She swallowed. “Are you a…”

Hitoshi couldn’t tell for sure, but he was pretty sure Izuku winked at her because she threw her arms around his next and everything after was crying and apologies and hugs. 

RT: Hey kid, not that I have a tracker on you

RT: But if I DID have a trackers, it might indicate that you and Inko-chan are on the train headed towards fucking Jedha.

WM: Mom says Hi

WM: And that she’s sorry about the hose thing

RT: YOU SHIT

RT: DO NOT BRING HER INTO THIS GODFORSAKEN SLUM

WM: She wants to see the agency

WM: And she brought cookies

RT: …

RT: What kind of cookies?

WM: Brown Sugar Oatmeal. You can have some if you tell me where the tracker on my mom is.

RT: It’s in her purse; that weird bug eyed pug charm thing on the strap. Do not let the ducklings near my fucking cookies. That includes Psy.

WM: BF is playing possum. Says he’s sick but is really getting a haircut and panicking about his wardrobe, according to Bird-dad. We’re gonna meet up tomorrow. Cat-dad is covering for him if I need to do any in person snooping so if you need me to look into anything it had better be something that can wait. 

WM: Mom also wants to know if you got that tracker into her pug before she bought it or if you cut it open without her noticing, which you had better not because is one of her favorites.

RT: You goddamn snitch.

RT: It fell off her purse last year. I put the tracker in then and left it in the lost and found at her office. It was small enough to inject through the fabric. Her stuffed dog is fine.

WM: She says don’t do that anymore.

WM: And that she has lots of shoes? I don’t understand that part.

RT: It’s okay, I dig it.

WM: Now she’s blushing. WHY is she blushing?

RT: I can’t help it if she’s cute when she’s taking a swing at somebody.

WM: If you guys are going to flirt can you not make me be the middleman?

Hitoshi met his probable future mother-in-law when Izuku brought her over to see the new house. Ostensibly they were all there to paint walls. In practice he, Aizawa, and Mic had already primed the walls the night before and pushed to finish the first coat shortly before Izuku and Inko-san showed up with bentos. 

“Oh my!” She said upon entry, looking up at the exposed beams in the ceiling. “This is nice, Izuku! The agency is doing that well?”

“Aizawa-san bought it as an income property.” Izuku explained. “We’re renting from him and he gave us a break on the deposits since Hitoshi’s family. Hey, Toshi! We’re here! Come say hi?”

Hitoshi had been hiding upstairs and shamelessly eavesdropping at the top of the stairs with Mic and Aizawa. He bit down on a swear and glared at Aizawa who made a pointed nod towards the stairwell. 

“Wait!” Mic hissed and fussed over Hitoshi’s hair then made him tuck in his t-shirt. “Okay, go!”

Inko-san was as round and soft-looking in person as she’d appeared from a distance. He hadn’t realized quite how small she was, though. Izuku only came up to his shoulder, but Izuku’s mother was even just slightly shorter than that next to her son. 

She reached out and grabbed Izu’s sleeve. “Izuku, he’s tall!” She whispered.

“I know, right?” Izuku grinned and somehow Hitoshi had never realized that was something his boyfriend liked about him. Their height difference had always made him nervous; like Izuku might one day get tired of having to stand on something so they could be eye to eye. 

“Midoriya-san.” Hitoshi bowed once he was downstairs. “I’m happy to meet you at last.”

Inko-san bowed back. Her eyes looked suspiciously damp. “I’m happy to meet you too.” She said. “I hope we’re able to get along well. I’m in your care.”

“I don’t think that will be a problem, ma’am.” Hitoshi said with complete honesty as he met Izuku’s eyes over the top of her head. “Do you want a tour? My dads are around here somewhere too.”

Izuku smiled and Inko-san agreed happily and mouthed three short words at him. Hitoshi smiled right back and knew his heart was in his eyes. 

The future looked pretty bright.

-Fin