Archive of Our Own ^beta

If there’s one thing Inko knows how to do it’s treat a black eye. She’s better at it than she’s ever wanted to be for the worst of reasons. She’s lost count, over the years, of the number of times her boy has come home with one eye or the other purpled and swelling and full of shame. It makes a helpless kind of feeling burn in her chest, like someone dripping acid on her heart.

The first time Izuku comes home with a black eye they didn’t even know he was quirkless yet- or rather would be for most of his adolescence. But even then he wasn’t… popular. People like talent. People like skill. And the only thing that comes easily to her boy is hard work. She’s proud of that, proud of him, because of all the skills to have in the world she thinks that’s one of the best you can.

Every prodigy in the world runs into a mountain they can’t leap over one day. Her boy has been running into mountains before he took his first breath and every day since he did.

Izuku was born, according to the doctors, on the small end. Enough so that they eyed him, tutting, and didn’t let her take him home for a month. And even when she finally got to bring her baby home they asked her to bring him in for regular appointments for the first few months, as a precaution.

Izuku grew. He ate regularly, slept well, and eventually the doctor stopped pursing his lips at the sight of him and told her she didn’t need to bring him in for another appointment unless she noticed something worrying.

Despite every bit of logic and sense telling her it’s not she’s always felt it was somehow her fault. Like the struggles Izuku has are due to some innate failure in her ability to bring him into the world as strong and healthy as most babies. Like if she’d been better in some nebulous way he’d have been strong enough to activate his quirk before he was 15.

Izuku grows up healthy if always a step behind everyone else. Always having to pause to size up a challenge his peers seem to fly over with ease and falling behind for it. He catches up, falls behind, and catches up again.  

By now it’s instinct for him to step back when the challenge comes, that calculating glint in his eye, and size this new mountain up. He can’t leap them, can’t fly over them on wings of talent and innate skill, but he knows which slopes he can run up, which must be walked, when to start climbing, and how to pick out the spots that won’t crumble under hands and feet.

And when he misjudges, when he goes tumbling back down that mountain, he knows better than anyone else how to haul himself back to his feet, dust off, and start climbing again. Every challenge he faces she watches him stumble less and less, the constant practice perfecting his ability to problem solve until she’s left breathless with pride. The very least Inko can do is tend the bruises and scrapes. Tending the bruises and scrapes is all she can do, actually.

But no one else appreciates her son’s one skill the way Inko does. Not his teachers. Not the other parents. And certainly not their children. Which is why Izuku gets his first black eye at three.

They were out at their normal park. Inko was reading, content in the belief that her son was safe to play without her hovering over him. She hears it happening before she sees it. Childish voices raised in anger. She recognizes them as the ones Izuku plays with most often so she looks up. Izuku hunches in on himself, clutching Katsuki’s newest All Might ball. Izuku was supposed to return it today after Katsuki let him borrow it but Katsuki hasn’t come to the park yet.

The other boys practically tower over him by comparison. She recognizes the largest one as Tsubasa, the grandson of Izuku’s doctor. Izuku flinches at something they say. Inko is too far to catch what it is. One boy takes an aggressive step forward. Inko shuts her book and stands to step in. But before she can one of the boys darts in, snatching the ball from Izuku. Her son cries out in surprise and wobbles. Tsubasa capitalizes on it, knocking Izuku down.

Izuku hits the ground hard, crying out.

“Izuku!” Inko yells, already running forward. Tsubasa’s cousin, tasked with babysitting him for the day while his grandfather works, finally looks up from his phone. Inko pays no mind to the teenager’s groaning and griping as she rushes to her son. Tsubasa and the rest of the boys cower back. The one who snatched the ball away drops it. It bounces into Izuku. He curls around it, sobbing hard.

 Inko drops to her knees in front of him and pulls him up.

“Sweet heart are you okay? Let me see, let mama see-” Izuku’s shoulders hitch with sobs as Inko gently guides his head up. She gasps when she spots the already darkening bruise around his eye. He must fallen on a rock, she thinks distantly as she tries to quell her own panic to help her son.

Distantly, she hears Tsubasa’s cousin yelling and scolding. The other boys’s families have noticed as well, coming over to take charge of their children. Inko brushes off apologies and attempts at reassuring her that they’re sure this is just some misunderstanding. That ‘boys will be boys’ and sometimes that means playing a little too rough. It didn’t look like playing to Inko.

She takes her son home. Applies ice packs to his bruised face and holds him in her lap, marathoning All Might movies she’s seen a dozen times over. She listens to him tell her how Katsuki’s friends accused him of stealing the ball, refusing to believe Katsuki had just left it over at their house and he was waiting for Katsuki to come play so he could give it back.

“They didn’t think he’d want to play with me on his own because I’m not… I’m not cool,” her baby mumbles, half muffled by her cardigan as he buries his face into her chest, ignoring the cartoon citizens cheering as an equally cartoony All Might defeats the movie’s feature villain.

Inko holds him tighter, whispering reassurances into his hair, and swears to herself that she’ll do everything she can to make sure this is the last time her baby comes home bruised on purpose. It’s a naive promise she quickly fails to keep.

Izuku’s face heals. She keeps him back from the park until she gets reluctant apologies from the other boys’s families as well as reassurances that they’ll keep a better eye on the situation. She thinks the solution is working. And it is. Izuku gets his diagnosis. Katsuki gets his quirk. Izuku hasn’t come home with any more bruises than is typical for the average rambunctious child.

But Katsuki is an independence and mischievous sort, leading her son and his little gang of neighborhood kids away from the watchful eyes of the adults. She frets but Izuku comes home unharmed and smiling harder than he has since the incident. And the neighborhood is quite safe. Well patrolled by both heroes and police with little reasons for villains to strike. So she lets it go on. It’s a mistake.

Izuku comes home soaking wet and weeping. Katsuki doesn’t want to be friends anymore and he doesn’t understand what he did. This Inko can handle. Children fight. It rarely lasts longer than a few days. Katsuki is stubborn so it might last a little longer. Inko isn’t really focused on that. She’s more concerned with the blood dribbling down her son’s nose and the bright purple bruise swelling his cheek. She does the same thing she did last time. Ice packs and movies, all the comfort she can give him, warm compresses the following days after the swelling is gone. She sits on the couch and watches an All Might documentary with her son, lets him softly tell her how he and Katsuki got in a fight and Katsuki stormed off. How Katsuki’s friends got mad that Izuku ruined everything and they hit him.

She calls parents, guardians, demands consequences. Most of what she gets is sour reassurances that it probably seems worse than it really is. That ‘boys will be boys’ but they’ll absolutely have a stern talk with their sons. There’s a sinking feeling in her stomach that it won’t be enough.

It isn’t. There are at least no more bruises but it’s a bitter mercy. Katsuki does not get over it. The other kids are quick to choose a side and Izuku is left alone. Her son is safe but he’s far from happy. There’s only so much a mother can do, so many roles she can fill in his life no matter how much she stretches and tries to fill them. She does her best and it’s not good enough.

Then Izuku starts going to school. And the bruises return. Every couple of months or so her boy comes home with black eyes and split lips, bruises littering his legs and arms. She rages. She talks to teachers, principals, parents. Nothing stops it. She looks into moving them but where could she possibly take them that wouldn’t be the same? At least here she knows the parents, has at least some relationship with them to lean on, some ability to pressure them into reigning their children back at least for a while.

She buys ice packs specifically for going over the eye. It feels like admitting defeat. It is.

Izuku stops telling her what exactly prompted each new black eye and Inko realizes she can’t pinpoint when he stopped. There aren’t even any useless calls to make, no pointless pleading for other parents to do something to stop their children from hurting her’s. The night she realizes this she presses her face into the pillow and cries herself to sleep. She tries to be quiet, tries not to let Izuku know. But her door cracks open anyway. She bites her lip to force the tears back.

“Izuku? Did you have a nightmare?”

Izuku silently shakes his head and steps into her room, pulling the door shut behind him. He climbs onto the bed and slips under the covers. She pulls him into her arms and he holds her back.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he whispers. Her fractured heart shatters and she shatters with it, folding him as close to her as she can and weeping into his hair. She ignores the discomfort of the wet spot growing on her shoulder from her son’s own tears.

“You don’t need to be sorry, baby. I’m supposed to protect you. I’m supposed to be able to stop them.”

He just silently squeezes her tighter and she holds him right back.