Chapter Text
October
Ikeda Hikari comes home in September and skirts the edges of her new world for nearly a month, tiptoeing even when she’s told she has no need to. Her grandparents had said she was normally a near-uncontrollable spitfire, but now she’s jumpy and nervous and terrifyingly prone to setting everything she approaches on fire without the slightest intent of doing so. Eri does her best to make her feel welcome, but Hikari is too wary to let her make any headway.
It takes all of five minutes for that to be undone.
She’s watching a talk show – they’re interviewing the famously media-shy Ground Zero today, and she wouldn’t miss a chance to hear him weasel his way out of awkward questions about his love life or the whereabouts of former classmates for the world – when Eri sneaks around back of the couch and leans down to rest her chin on top of the backrest. Hikari, attuned to the smallest movements now that she’s in an unfamiliar home, jumps, and Eri knows well enough now to see the writing on the wall.
Hikari’s quirk activates at the spike in cortisol and fire licks at the couch cushions. She jumps up, flames flaring up as panic begins to build behind her ribcage, and clamps her hand over her mouth so she won’t scream, a habit she’s learned through years of damage control. But Eri isn’t fazed; she’s had a plan for a moment like this since Hikari came to live with her family, and she can’t wait to test it out.
But first, protocol.
“Are you all right?” Eri asks evenly, careful not to approach her adopted sister for fear of being burnt herself.
“The couch,” Hikari croaks. “It’s-“
“Don’t worry about the couch, Hikari.” With a smile, she reminds herself – rule number one, always. What would Mirio do if he were here? Deku? “Are you okay?”
Rule number two: figure out the most rational thing to do. “You might wanna go to the kitchen, though. It’s tile, so you won’t burn anything in there.”
“Are you sure?” Hikari asks, face ashen. Her hands, at very least, are flame-free again, but flames still lick at her shirt; she’ll be all right even if it burns to a crisp, but she’ll need a replacement. Eri files that information away for later.
“It’s the rational thing to do.” She flashes Hikari a smile that, thankfully, doesn’t resemble her father’s nearly as much as her words do – only an Aizawa would ever think that way at the tender age of ten. “I’ll deal with the couch.”
“They’re gonna be so mad,” Hikari murmurs, crestfallen, as she shuffles off.
“Not if they never find out,” Eri says under her breath, touching her hand to a part of the couch that isn’t on fire. She’s never exactly tried this, but she has no reason to think that her quirk only works on people, and she concentrates as hard as she can-
She opens her eyes.
The cushions are still on fire.
“That should’ve worked,” she mutters, biting her lip in concentration and redoubling her efforts – again, nothing. “Come on!”
“Eri-chan? Hikari?”
Eri’s eyes widen in shock and, though she pours every ounce of strength she has into her efforts, she can’t seem to make her quirk cooperate, and with her mother’s footsteps approaching fast, there’s little she can do but try and cross her fingers.
“I smell smoke,” Emi mutters, rubbing at her tired eyes as she pokes her head through the living room door. “What happened?”
Hikari, only smoldering now (though her favorite Ground Zero sweatshirt is tattered beyond repair), shuffles back into the living room, hanging her head guiltily. “I got startled,” she admits. “I’m really sorry about the couch.”
Eri freezes, caught in headlights, and then hangs her head. “I was trying to rewind it,” she explains. “The couch. So it wouldn’t get burnt up. ‘Cause I was the one who startled her.”
Emi surveys the scene: two shamefaced ten-year-olds, more united in purpose than they’ve ever been; the smoking remains of Shouta’s disgusting couch; Hikari’s charred sweatshirt, barely hanging on. And she shouldn’t – the girls need reassurance now, and besides, the smell of smoke makes her nauseous – but she can’t help but laugh. “Your quirk only works on living things, remember, Eri-chan?” she manages to say before she turns away to hide the mirth on her face.
“I didn’t know that was an actual rule.” Eri crosses her arms. “Otosan’s gonna be mad about the couch.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Emi sighs, “good riddance.”
“Hah?” Hikari seems to snap out of some daze. Emi doubts it’s a coincidence how much she sounds like Bakugou when she’s acting a little more like herself and that only adds to the list of things she has to try not to laugh at.
“That couch…it’s older than either of you are. It was dirt-cheap to begin with and it’s probably infected. I’m pretty sure Otosan found it on the side of the road, Hikari,” Emi laughs. “Honestly, you did us all a favor!”
Well, perhaps not in filling the room with smoke, but Emi can appreciate a silver lining as well as anyone – no matter how forlorn her husband looks as he watches his first-years carry his couch of thirteen years to the elevator like a casket.
Hikari gains a great deal of respect for Aizawa Eri that day, and that seems to imply that the parents who’d raised such a level-headed and enviably intelligent daughter have to be at least somewhat trustworthy. She thinks back on Eri’s words – “it’s the rational thing to do,” as if it really was – and wonders just how much more there is to Eri than meets the eye.
Whatever the answer, she doesn’t startle at Eri’s approach anymore.
**
November
“You’ve been acting strange.”
“Well, good morning to you, too.” Emi swats Shouta’s arm, clumsily half-asleep. “Can this wait ‘til I’m actually awake?”
“That’s the exact problem, Emi.” Shouta’s forehead creases with frown lines. “You’re almost never really awake anymore.”
“So? ‘m tired.” She rolls over to pillow her head against Shouta’s chest, sighing sleepily when his hands begin to comb through her hair. “Don’t think it’s all that weird for someone as busy as I am to be a little fatigued.”
“You can barely get out of bed. I would hardly call that ‘a little fatigued.’”
“So I’m going through a rough patch,” she replies.
“You keep saying that the smell of smoke makes you sick.”
“Yeah, and?” Emi yawns.
“It never used to.”
“Well, it does now.”
“Which is unusual.” Shouta lays his hand against the small of her back with just enough pressure to hold her in place. “And that isn’t the only strange thing that’s been making you feel sick lately, either.”
“Orange juice,” she agrees. “What are you getting at?”
“Are you pregnant?”
“Could be,” Emi says nonchalantly. “Actually, now that you mention it, I wouldn’t be all that surprised.”
“I figured as much.”
“Would you be upset if I was?”
“…upset?”
“Well, why else would you ask?”
“Because the symptoms lined up and I’m worried about you.” His thumb traces circles against her shoulderblade. “Maybe the timing would be unideal, but upset? Not at all.”
Emi laughs huffily. “Should probably get that checked on, shouldn’t I.”
Shouta presses a kiss to the crown of her head and smiles at the way she stretches contentedly against him, draped across his chest like a human blanket the way she’s always loved to. “That would probably be a good idea.”
“If I am, and you knew before I did-“
“I wouldn’t sweat that. I’m kind of an Emi expert.”
She has a pillow shoved in his face before he even has time to think.
**
“Shou?”
“Yeah?” he swallows hard even though he knows she’ll feel it, back pressed against his as hers is now. He’s always liked this sleeping position, back-to-back – they never leave each other unguarded this way. But it makes it hard to hide, too.
“I took a test today.”
“Okay. Good.” Breathe. “And?”
“Positive.”
“Really?”
“No, it said ‘all signs point to no.’”
This is fine. Totally fine! Cool, cool, cool, no doubt. Nothing to see here. Nope, nothing. Nothing at all. “And how do you feel about that?”
She laughs shakily. “At least now I can say that I got one of my kids the fun way.”
**
June
“Like father, like son, hm?”
Emi has never, in an entire lifetime of near-interrupted smugness, looked more smug than she does right now. Odd, considering that she doesn’t seem to have monopolized the genes her as-yet-unnamed son inherited if his tufts of black hair and cantankerous disposition have anything to say about it.
Perhaps she likes the idea that he’ll give his father a taste of his own medicine.
Shouta doesn’t even seem to notice, though. “Not really,” he says, his voice soft even though it needs to be loud enough to be heard over the baby’s cries. His index figure traces the outline of his face, and he’s quiet for a moment. “That’s your nose, not mine.”
Emi’s heart feels like it’s going to splinter and crack with so much adrenaline on a collision course with the aching fondness she feels as she watches them; she laughs softly, in need of some sort of release before it does. “He’s two hours old, Shouta. He doesn’t look like anyone yet.”
He gives her one of his Looks. “He looks like you.”
“He looks like a squishy potato,” Emi murmurs, reaching out her arms even though every movement makes her wince. “What exactly are you insinuating, Eraser?”
Shouta hands over the baby with another pointed look. “That’s very rude of you, Emi.”
“Hey, potatoes are a staple crop for a reason.” She flashes what’s meant to be a smirk but is really just an exhausted half-smile. “It’s actually kind of a compliment.”
“He does not look like a potato” – and she has to smile and this rare moment of sentimentality – “and the far more pressing concern here is not who he resembles but the fact that he still doesn’t even have a name.”
“Ugh, no, he doesn’t.” The weight of Emi’s exhaustion is finally starting to settle, and that particular realization sits on her shoulders like solid lead.
Shouta looks up to make sure he’s caught her eye. When he’s sure he has, he swallows hard and replies, “don’t ask me to explain how I came to such an irrational conclusion, but he looks like a Daichi to me.”
It takes a full minute for that to sink in.
“After my dad.”
“Unless you don’t want to.” His hands flex and curl as they always do when he’s nervous. “Sorry.”
“No,” Emi murmurs, glancing from her husband’s face to her son’s – and he thinks he looks like me. Ridiculous – and offering a tiny nod of assent. “Actually, he really does.”
**
December
In Hitoshi’s defense, this really isn’t his fault.
Really, he’d been doing everyone a favor. The Aizawa-senseis (as most of his classmates have insisted upon calling them since they married) had asked him to watch their children for a weekend – no sweat. No problem. Eri’s as responsible as eleven-year-olds get, and he doesn’t really know their other daughter too well, but Shouta always says she’s a smart girl with a fierce protective streak and that lends itself well to home-aloneing with her baby brother. So this really shouldn’t be an issue at all.
But he is the first Class 1-A graduate to meet baby Daichi, and he would be kind of remiss if he didn’t take this very rare opportunity to throw that back in his illustrious classmates’ faces (apparently even pro heroes have to take their petty victories where they can find them). It’s just a selfie with the baby in their group chat – harmless, surely.
Then Yaomomo expresses her outrage at having been so cruelly jipped.
And Midoriya notices a blurry Ground Zero hoodie in the background.
And makes sure that Bakugou notices it, too.
And suddenly there are two Aizawa children who have the class’ interest, and if he isn’t careful, Hitoshi is going to end up with an unwanted class reunion and a burnt-down house on his hands, because Hikari would take that shock about as well as she’d take a root canal.
Breathe, Shinso.
I wasn’t supposed to let him see anyone or take him outside. Babies don’t have immune systems.
That should do the trick.
Understandable, but yes, they do, Yaomomo replies. They’re weak, but they’re there.
“Great,” he mutters. He’s got to throw them all a bone if he wants them to let go of the idea of getting together, so he goes for the only thing he knows will distract them.
He’s not even the interesting one. Hikari is so obsessed with Bakugou that she started asking everyone to call her Hikachan when she found out about the Kacchan thing bc it sounds so similar, he says, and sits back and waits.
None of them have ever had a fan like that before. And it’s a little too satisfying to watch their group chat blow up when they realize that it’s the classmate with all the winning charm of a swarm of bees who’s won the undying adoration of a girl he hasn’t even met yet.
**
Few things amuse Aizawa Emi more than the realization that a new class of students, never mind the fact that they live with him, have any idea that their homeroom teacher is married. This probably strikes her as funny only because her students know almost everything there is to know about her family, but it’s still a good laugh on the rare occasions when she makes appearances on campus or in the Heights Alliance and catches gaping first-years staring at her as if she’s just appeared out of thin air.
(She hears the whispers, too. Apparently days when she’s caught fixing his tie in the halls before class are supposed to be good ones to try to get away with things; she files away the tidbit for reference.)
It isn’t the least bit surprising that Shouta prefers not to mix business with pleasure. And he’s private already – the last thing he probably wants is a gaggle of over-eager fifteen-year-olds questioning him about his family life, demanding baby pictures (he’ll probably die if he’s ever forced to admit how many he has to the class he already has enough trouble keeping in order without them deciding he’s ‘gone soft’) or making the kind of comments high schoolers always make when they find out that a teacher’s spouse is attractive. (“Have you heard that Aizawa’s wife is hot?” is already a common enough refrain among the upperclassmen without his fanning the flames.) But Emi – perhaps because comedy has always been her thing, or perhaps because she’s felt more haggard than ever the last handful of years with one too many things on her plate and likes to be shown off once in a while – rather likes stirring the pot.
He knows exactly what she’s doing when Emi insists on walking him to class, but he still finds himself tongue-tied, red-faced, and more than a little dizzy when she stops him in front of his classroom door, presses a hand to his chest in lieu of fixing the tie he never wants to wear, and rises on her toes to kiss him.
His two-weeks-into-first-year homeroom class is filing in faster by the minute. He should care about this. He really doesn’t.
“Go easy on ‘em, Eraser, okay?” she says with a teasing smile, brushing his unruly hair back out of his eyes. He gapes like a fish for a moment before he manages to snap himself out of it.
“No promises,” he mutters, trying his best to sound disgruntled when they both know full well that he would quite like to do that again.
(Rumor has it that Aizawa’s wife is hot.
Much as he wants his students to shut up about that kiss, he really can’t blame them for coming to that conclusion.)
**
The Aizawa family’s most persistently-recurring argument kicks off almost as soon as Eri and Hikari start middle school.
Eri’s had her heart set on the UA hero course for almost as long as she’s lived with her father; everybody knows that, and no one would even think to question it anymore. It’s a dream she repeatedly announces that she hopes she’ll be able to share with her adopted sister, who might well be a formidable opponent one day if her quirk training (she’s only charred up two sweatshirts and one piece of furniture this year!) keeps progressing the way it has. Hikari, for her part, is perfectly fine with this – it’s the one area in which she seems content to follow her sister instead of leading.
Except, of course, in the moments when she’s frustrated with her sister and aiming to wound.
On those occasions, she has several tried-and-true tactics for shutting down arguments she knows she can’t win. One: insisting that, were the rankings not rigged by “corporations” (a vaguely-defined and poorly-understood entity she enjoys blaming for just about everything), Ground Zero – her professional of choice – would’ve topped Deku – Eri’s professional of choice – in the hero charts a long time ago. Two: claiming that Daichi is napping (never mind that he hates naps and he rarely is – “like father, like son” indeed) and that any further argument would wake him.
Three: the words “I’m going to Ketsubutsu.”
Emi supposes it’s some kind of cosmic retribution for her years of teasing Shouta that her daughter considers the thought of going to her alma mater so scandalous that she frequently invokes its name to win arguments with her sister.
Unlike her father, though, Eri actually believes this most of the time, and she’s always prepared to dig in her heels and make a stand for her high school of choice. Emi’s honestly surprised that she doesn’t have a PowerPoint presentation prepared to whip out the second such an argument starts to flare up – Eri likes order and structure and bullet-point logic, something she probably got from her father, and it would be very like her to do something like that. She doesn’t, though; Hikari has an opening, and with the brute-force commitment she gives to almost everything from her kendo classes to controlling her quirk, she spins arguments in favor of Ketsubutsu that they all know she doesn’t mean.
It’s still a special kind of relief when, two years later, she asks her parents to sign the consent form that’ll let her register for the UA entrance exam.
**
“Got that?”
“I think so.” Daichi blinks up at his mother in obvious confusion but won’t admit that he doesn’t understand her instructions – typical Shouta. Emi knows them both well enough now to see when they’re pretending.
“Okay, one more time.” She crouches in front of him so she’ll be closer to his eye level, keeping her voice soft and her distance comfortably removed because he hates loud noises and invasions of his space almost equally. “Eri-chan and Hikachan are going to distract Otosan, and then you’re gonna tell Otosan that you want to ask him something, okay?”
Daichi nods. “Okay.”
“And then when you’re looking at his eyes” – she makes eye contact to demonstrate – “like this, you’re going to look at him for as long as you can without blinking.”
He nods, sucking on his thumb.
“And then,” Emi continues, her eyes sparkling with mischief, “Okasan’s gonna make him laugh.”
Daichi blinks again, mystified.
“Okay,” he says softly. Granted, his voice is always quiet, but it seems especially so now.
There are decided perks to the family’s recent discovery that Daichi got his father’s quirk along with his shaggy black hair and antisocial tendencies. One – far more reliable Hikachan-proofing when he’s old enough to control it. Two – sweet, sweet revenge.
He falls for it far more often than he should, but he never seems to mind as much as he wants them to think he does. Really, it’s almost sweet how much better he’s gotten at conceding defeat – usually a grudging “well played, okusan” and a kiss to the side of her head as he tucks her under his arm are all the acknowledgement it gets. But if she’s honest with herself, that’s as much reason for the ruse as any other.
**
“You are absolutely not interning with Ground Zero.”
Hikari doesn’t look impressed.
“I find his particular brand of heroism to be incredibly reckless. Unsafe, even. No.” Shouta doesn’t have any intention of backing down.
Neither does Hikari, though. “He already agreed to take me on,” she says, pink-tipped ponytail swishing as she shakes her head.
“Well, tell him you changed your mind.”
“I’m going anyway.” Hikari’s jaw sets. “And Eri’s interning at the same agency” – that had been one of the strongest selling points of her plan – “so if anything goes down, she’ll be there.”
“The mere fact that something could go down-“
“I’m doing it.”
**
Emi never admits it, but the long, muggy summer nights her daughters spend at home when their work-study days end are the best kind she knows.
Usually, they bring friends over – Sora (blue hair, chaotic, a favorite) and Kyosho (never talks) and Ren (smug little jerk, probably in love with Hikachan) from school; any of the thousand interns Deku can’t seem to stop himself from taking on who they’ve met through the agency – and poke around doing nothing of value. Someone’s indignant shouts can usually be heard as their video game avatar dies onscreen; occasionally, they’ll try to binge an entire anime in a night, or watch movies without the volume and make up their own dialogue as they go. The living room is nearly always in shambles by the end of those nights and most of their friends wind up crashing; Daichi usually tries to join in but falls asleep on one of his sisters or their guests. It’s messy and loud and haphazard and carefree and all the things Emi had feared her children would never get to experience.
Maybe she loves those nights because she gets to watch the future she’s spent a lifetime fighting for play out in present tense, easy and natural as if it’s always been this way.
“We did that, Shou,” she murmurs one night as she watches Hikachan slam a pillow into Ren’s face and the television beeps indignantly at the interruption to the game they’re playing, shrugging off the wall she’s leaning against to wrap her arms around her husband’s waist. “We made that.”
“The kids?”
“No, just…this.” ‘A world where this is the kind of life they get to lead,’ she doesn’t add.
“Oh. Right.” His hand settles warm and weighty at her hip. “I guess we did.” She’s right, as she usually is. And he smiles - he’d never thought this would be his reality. It had been illogical to hope that it might be but perhaps, looking back on it, reason had been on his side all along.
Just as she has.