My Hero Academia: Child's Play

Chapter 1: The Boy With Old Eyes

Every mother remembers the first time she holds her child. Inko Midoriya would spend the rest of her life wishing she could forget.

She'd been in labor for eleven hours by the time the doctors finally laid him against her chest, and for eleven hours she'd pictured this exact moment — the wailing, red-faced bundle, the flood of relief, the love that was supposed to hit her like a wave the second their eyes met. She got the weight of him, warm and impossibly small. She got the relief. She never got the wailing.

"He's not crying," Inko said, panic climbing fast into her throat.

Nurse Ishida didn't look up from checking vitals, her voice rehearsed-calm, the kind doctors used on new mothers a hundred times a shift. "Some babies don't, not right away. Lungs are just clearing themselves out. Look, he's breathing fine."

He was breathing fine. His small chest rose and fell, steady as a heartbeat, untroubled. He simply didn't seem to feel that crying about any of it was necessary.

It was the nurse who noticed the eyes. She'd delivered enough babies to know newborns kept the world blurred and half-shut for the first few days, feeling their way toward focus one flinch at a time. This one's eyes were open before the cord was even cut — dark green, unnervingly clear — and they moved. Not the aimless drifting of a newborn's gaze, but something slower. Something deliberate. Like he was taking attendance.

"Mrs. Midoriya." The rehearsed calm had gone out of the nurse's voice. "Has he smiled at all?"

"He's an hour old."

"I know."

Inko looked down. He was already looking back up at her — had been for longer than she'd realized — with a small, unhurried curl at the corner of his mouth that had nothing to do with gas, nothing to do with reflex, and everything to do with something that raised the hair on her arms a full second before her mind caught up and told her that was insane, he's a baby, babies don't —

The smile widened. Just slightly. Like he'd heard the thought and found it funny.

The door banged open hard enough to rattle a monitor somewhere down the hall, and Hisashi Midoriya came through it still smelling of smoke, one sleeve of his hero costume scorched black at the cuff, the tie he insisted on wearing underneath the whole ridiculous getup hanging loose around his collar.

"Sorry — sorry, sorry, I know, I know." He was breathless, hair damp, the faint dry-scaled patches along his jaw that only showed when he'd pushed his Quirk hard still flushed a dull orange-red. "Gas main under the Kaisus Street off-ramp, some idiot villain thought melting it open was a clever exit, and then there was a cat stuck under a car and I couldn't just — it doesn't matter. Is he — are you —"

He finally looked at the bed, and every ounce of frantic energy in him dissolved at once into something soft.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, look at him."

He didn't see it. Inko watched her husband's whole face crumple into pure, uncomplicated joy as he reached out one huge, careful hand to brush a knuckle against their son's cheek, and whatever she'd glimpsed a moment ago — the eyes, the smile, the awful sense of being laughed at by something that hadn't existed twenty minutes earlier — receded so far back into the part of her mind reserved for thoughts new mothers weren't supposed to have that she nearly convinced herself she'd imagined the whole thing.

Nearly.

*　*　*

They named him Izuku. It meant, roughly, to forge ahead — Hisashi had liked the sound of it, the idea of a boy who'd push through anything life put in front of him. Inko would wonder, in the years that came after, whether a name could curse a child, or whether her son would have turned out exactly the same no matter what they'd written on the paperwork.