Iron legacy

Chapter One: The Mail Nobody Reads

The funeral was small.

That was the first thing Izuku noticed, in the distant, cataloguing way he noticed most things now — like his brain had decided that counting was safer than feeling. Twelve people. A priest. A photo of his mother from three years ago, the good one, the one where she was laughing at something off-camera and hadn't yet started looking tired all the time.

He stood in a black suit that didn't fit right in the shoulders, because nobody had thought to get him a new one, and watched the incense smoke curl up toward a gray sky that seemed appropriately unbothered by the whole thing.

"Izuku."

He turned. Mitsuki Bakugo was crouching in front of him, which put her nearly eye level, her sharp face uncharacteristically soft. Katsuki stood a step behind her, hands jammed in his pockets, staring very hard at a spot on the ground like it owed him money.

"You're staying with us tonight," Mitsuki said. It wasn't a question. "And however many nights after that, until we sort out — " she stopped herself, glanced at the coffin, exhaled through her nose. "Until we sort things out."

"Thank you, Auntie Mitsuki." His voice came out steady. He'd practiced that, actually — steady — in the bathroom mirror that morning, because he'd learned a long time ago that if he sounded like he was about to fall apart, adults panicked and started making decisions *for* him, and Izuku had strong opinions about decisions being made for him.

Mitsuki's eyes searched his face like she didn't quite believe the steadiness, and honestly, fair. She pulled him into a hug instead of interrogating it, and he let her, chin hooked over her shoulder, watching Katsuki not look at him.

"Deku," Katsuki muttered, when his mother finally let go. Just that. Just his name — the mean nickname that had somehow, over the years, gone soft at the edges without either of them noticing.

"Kacchan," Izuku said back, and something about the normal exchange, on the worst day, made his throat go tight in a way the whole funeral hadn't managed.

Katsuki didn't say anything else. He just stood there, hands still in his pockets, radiating the kind of aggressive discomfort that meant *I don't know what to do with my hands or my face and I refuse to cry in public,* and honestly, that was more comforting than anything anyone else had said all day. Katsuki being quiet was rarer than a solar eclipse. Izuku filed it away as evidence that the universe understood the gravity of the occasion.

The Bakugo house smelled like Mitsuki's cooking and Masaru's quiet, patient existence, and Izuku spent three nights there before Child Services — polite, overworked, clearly juggling forty other cases — explained that "staying with family friends indefinitely" wasn't actually a legal category, and that there'd be a temporary placement while they sorted out guardianship.

Izuku nodded along, said all the right things, and privately started doing math. Foster care statistics. Group home statistics. The average time a nine-year-old spent in the system before something *stuck*. He didn't like any of the numbers.

He went back to the apartment — his and his mother's, still smelling like her, which was somehow the worst part — to collect the last of his things before the placement started. That was when he found it, on the kitchen table where the notary's assistant must have left it after the reading of the will, sitting under a rice cooker like it wasn't the single most important piece of paper in his short life.