Archive of Our Own

The thing about Izuku—the thing that Katsuki noticed when they were four years old and has been noticing, helplessly, obsessively, for the twenty-six years since—is that he has never once in his entire life done anything by halves.

When he was a child, he loved heroes with an intensity that bordered on religious fervor, filling notebook after notebook with observations and analyses and dreams so big they should have crushed him under their weight.

When he was a teenager, he fought, with everything he had, against villains who should have killed him, against a body that kept breaking under the strain of his own power, against the slow, creeping certainty that he would never be enough, that he would always be playing catch-up to the boy who could make explosions from his palms.

When he fell in love with Katsuki-- and it was a falling, a slow, inexorable tumble that neither of them saw coming until it was too late to stop it—he loved with the same consuming, all-encompassing ferocity, showing up in the hospital after every near-fatal fight and staying, staying, staying, even when Katsuki tries to push him away, even when Katsuki tells him he’s being stupid, even when Katsuki doesn’t deserve it and they both know it.

So of course he was exactly like that as a parent.

And the thing about being a father—the thing that Katsuki Bakugou will never, under any circumstances, say out loud, not even under threat of death or, worse, public embarrassment—is that it’s boring, and the boredom is the part that actually tries to kill you, not the screaming midnight fevers or the first time she fell off the couch and he saw her head hit the floor in slow motion and forgot how to breathe for an entire three seconds that felt like a lifetime. No, those moments are sharp and terrible and then they’re over, adrenaline dumping out of his system in shaky-handed bursts while Izuku hovers at his elbow with that look on his face, the one that says I told you so without actually saying it, which is somehow worse than if he just opened his mouth and let the words out.

What gets him, and settles into his chest like a low-grade infection, is the thousand tiny mundanities: the half-hour arguments over a single bite of broccoli, the way Sakura insists on wearing her All Might rain boots when it hasn’t rained in two weeks, the endless, soul-crushing cycle of laundry that produces more laundry, a hydra of tiny socks and strained-pea-stained onesies that multiply in the dark corners of the hamper when he isn’t looking.

He never wanted this, which is the first thing people get wrong, because the people who look at him—at them, at the explosive hero Dynamight and his husband, the Deku, who smiled his way through a war and came out the other side with more scars than skin and a heart that somehow still believed in things—assume that the reluctance was his, that it was Katsuki who dragged his feet when Izuku first brought it up, sitting cross-legged on their couch in their too-small apartment in Musutafu, tears already gathering in his eyes.

And maybe that would have made a better story, a neater narrative: the angry one who didn’t want children, softened by the gentle one’s persistence, learning to love against his will. But the truth is messier than that, the truth is that Katsuki looked at Izuku six months into their marriage, watched him come home from a patrol where he’d talked a jumper down from a ledge with nothing but his voice and his stupid, earnest face, and decided.

Of course he'd asked Izuku, but their dynamic never really consisted of asking because neither were the type to deny the other a thing. 

So the wanting came first, from him, and Izuku— Izuku who had spent his entire life wanting things quietly, carefully, as if wanting too loudly would make them disappear had looked at him with an expression Katsuki still can’t quite name, something between relief and terror and a joy so profound it seemed to hurt him, and said, “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let’s do it. Let’s be parents.”

And then, because nothing in their lives has ever been simple, because the universe seems to take personal offense at the idea of Bakugou Katsuki and Midoriya Izuku having anything easy, they spent three years in the trenches of foster licensing and home studies and the particular cruelty of social workers who looked at Katsuki’s file and saw a violent teenager instead of a man who had spent a decade proving he was more than the sum of his worst moments. Three years of Izuku holding his hand under the table during interviews, thumb pressing into his palm in steady, grounding circles while a woman in sensible flats asked them about their support systems and their parenting philosophies and, pointedly, about “anger management strategies.” Three years of being told they were perfect, they were wonderful, they were exactly what these children needed, and then getting ghosted, getting passed over, getting the phone call that went to someone else, someone safer, someone who didn’t have a villain’s body count attached to their name even if that body count was built from the corpses of people who would have burned the world down if they’d been allowed to live.

And then, when they had stopped hoping, when they had stopped checking their phones every five minutes, when Katsuki had started to think maybe the wanting was the punishment, maybe the wanting was the thing he wasn’t allowed to have, they got the call about Sakura.

Sakura, who was three years old and had been removed from a home that wasn’t a home, who had been passed between three foster families in eight months, who had stopped talking somewhere along the way and hadn’t started again. Sakura, whose file said “non-verbal, possible selective mutism, possible trauma-related developmental delays, possible everything,” which was social worker code for we don’t know what’s wrong with her and we don’t know how to fix it and we’re giving her to you because no one else will take her. Sakura, who had huge dark eyes that didn’t blink enough, who sat in the corner of the visitation room with her knees drawn up to her chest and her small hands pressed flat against her shins, who looked at Katsuki when he walked in and then looked through him, past him, at the wall behind him, at anything that wasn’t his face.

He remembers Izuku dropping to his knees on the institutional carpet, heedless of the knees of his good pants, and sitting there, not reaching for her, not speaking, just sitting and being present in her space with his hands visible and his posture soft, the way they’d learned in the training sessions that felt like they were preparing them for a hostage negotiation rather than parenthood. He remembers Izuku pulling out his phone and showing her pictures of cats, scrolling slowly, letting her look if she wanted to look, letting her not look if she didn’t. He remembers standing in the doorway, useless, too big and too loud and too much, feeling like his presence alone was a violence she shouldn’t have to endure.

She looked at him, eventually. She looked at him for a long time, her face unreadable, and then she held out her hand.

First to Izuku, who was doing everything right, who was gentle and patient and everything a traumatized child should want. And then to him. To Katsuki, who was still standing in the doorway like an asshole, who hadn’t moved or spoken or done anything except exist in the same room as her.

He doesn’t know what she saw. He’s never asked. But he knelt down, slow, slower than he’s ever done anything in his life, and he let her small, cold hand wrap around his index finger, and he thought oh, and the wanting that had been a dull ache in his chest for three years sharpened into something that felt like it might actually kill him.

That was two years ago.

Now she is five, and she talks, sort of, sometimes, to some people, in certain circumstances, and her favorite thing in the world is for Katsuki to sit on the floor of her bedroom and watch her line up her collection of hero figurines—mostly All Might, because Izuku has been curating her exposure to hero media with the same intensity he once applied to analyzing fight strategies, but also a slowly growing contingent of Dynamight merchandise that Katsuki did not buy and absolutely did not sign off on and definitely does not keep the prototypes of in his agency locker—in patterns that make sense only to her. Now she is five, and she has nightmares, and when she wakes up screaming, it is Katsuki she wants, Katsuki she clings to, Katsuki who sits with her in the dark and lets her practice her breathing exercises, the ones Aizawa-sensei taught them, the ones that are supposed to calm her nervous system down even when her brain is telling her the monsters are real and they are coming and no one can stop them.

Aizawa-sensei, who is not Aizawa-sensei anymore, not to Katsuki, not really, not since he graduated and became something like a colleague and something like a friend and something like the only person outside of Izuku who knows exactly how deep the fear goes, how close to the surface it lives. Aizawa-sensei who retired from active hero work after the war, who took a position at a specialized child psychology practice because, he said, he’d spent enough time putting broken children back together with duct tape and sheer stubbornness and wanted to try it with actual training and a license, for once.

Aizawa-sensei who had been the one to call, three days after Sakura moved in with them, who had said, “Bring her in,” in that flat voice that didn’t invite argument, who had spent two hours sitting on the floor of his office with Sakura while she ignored him completely, building a tower of blocks and knocking it down, building it again, knocking it down, while Katsuki and Izuku sat on the couch and watched and tried not to hold hands too visibly, like teenagers on a first date instead of grown men who had faced down the apocalypse and found it less terrifying than a five-year-old who wouldn’t look at them.

“She’s dissociating,” Aizawa had said afterwards, when Sakura was in the waiting room with a trusted assistant, building another tower, knocking it down. “It’s a protective mechanism. She’s learned that checking out is safer than being present. We’ll work on giving her reasons to want to stay.”

That had been two years ago. They are still working on it. Some days, Sakura is present and bright and funny, with a dry sense of humor that she definitely got from Katsuki and a habit of muttering to herself when she’s thinking that she definitely got from Izuku, and those days feel so normal, so easy, that Katsuki almost forgets the weight of it, almost lets himself believe that they’re just a family, just three people living in a house with too many All Might posters and not enough counter space. And then there are days when she wakes up and she’s not there, when her eyes go glassy and her body goes still and she sits on the couch for hours without moving, without responding, without blinking, and Katsuki sits beside her and talks to her anyway, about nothing, about the weather, about what he’s making for dinner, about the stupid argument he had with Izuku that morning about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom, and he waits for her to come back, and he tries not to think about what it took to teach her that leaving her own body was the only way to survive.

The mundane and the heavy, tangled together so tightly he can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

Like now. Now it is a Tuesday, which means Izuku has a late patrol and won’t be home until after Sakura’s bedtime, and Katsuki is making katsudon because it’s the one thing she’ll reliably eat without a fight, and she is sitting at the kitchen table with a piece of paper and a set of crayons that are technically hers but that Katsuki has definitely stolen to use for his own hero schedule planning because they’re better than the shitty office supplies his agency provides, and she is drawing something with intense concentration, her tongue poking out between her lips the way Izuku’s does when he’s working on a complex analysis.

“What’re you drawing?” he asks, not because he expects an answer—she might answer, she might not, it depends on a set of variables he’s never been able to fully map—but because the sound of his voice in the quiet kitchen is its own kind of anchor, something for her to hold onto if she wants it.

She doesn’t answer for a long moment, and then she says, “A family,” in her small, serious voice, and Katsuki’s hands don’t falter on the pork cutlets, because he has learned, over two years, not to react too visibly to things, not to let the emotions show on his face before he’s had a chance to sort through them, to figure out which ones are his and which ones are echoes of something older, something that doesn’t belong to him.

“Yeah?” he says, keeping his voice even. “What’s the family doing?”

“Being together,” she says, which is such a simple answer, such a devastating answer, that Katsuki has to stare at the frying oil for a full ten seconds before he trusts himself to turn around.

The drawing, when he finally looks, is chaos—crayon figures with too-large heads and stick limbs, a tangle of green and blond and black that he has to study for a moment before he understands that it’s not three separate people, it’s one person, one figure with green hair and blond hair and black hair all mashed together, arms and legs overlapping in ways that don’t make anatomical sense, a single body made of three people pressed so close they’ve become indistinguishable.

“That’s us,” she says, and it’s not a question.

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice does something strange at the end, cracks a little on the vowel. “Yeah, that’s us.”

She looks up at him then, and her eyes are present, sharp, watching him in that way she has, like she’s cataloging his reactions, filing them away for later. “Papa, why are you sad?”

He blinks. He didn’t know she could tell. He thought he was getting better at hiding it, the constant low-level grief that sits beneath everything, the mourning for a version of her that might have existed if things had been different, if someone had protected her, if someone had loved her the way she deserved from the very beginning. He thought he was getting better at not letting her see it, because the last thing she needs is to feel responsible for his emotions, to think that her happiness is a burden he carries.

“I’m not sad,” he says, which is a lie, but it’s the kind of lie that’s necessary, the kind that builds a structure for her to stand on. “I’m making katsudon. You want extra sauce?”

She considers this, her head tilting in that bird-like way she has. “Yes. Extra sauce. And Papa?”

“What?”

“Aizawa-sensei says it’s okay to be sad. He says feelings are just feelings and they don’t mean anything bad about you.”

He closes his eyes for a moment, and he sees Aizawa’s face, impassive, patient, the same expression he wore when Katsuki was fifteen and screaming at everyone who came near him, when Katsuki was drowning in his own rage and didn’t even know it, when Aizawa looked at him and said, “You’re not a bad person, Bakugou. You’re just a person who’s having a hard time,” and Katsuki had wanted to punch him and also, inexplicably, to cry, and had done neither, had just stood there with his fists clenched and his teeth grinding and felt, for the first time, like someone saw him and didn’t immediately look away.

“Aizawa-sensei is very smart,” he manages, and his voice is steady now, steady enough that she won’t hear the wobble underneath.

“He says you’re smart too,” she offers, and returns to her drawing, adding a sun in the corner, a bright yellow circle with rays that extend beyond the edges of the paper. “He says you’re the smartest student he ever had, even though you were a problem.”

“He said I was a problem?”

“He said you were a lot,” she corrects, and Katsuki can hear Aizawa’s voice in the words, the careful phrasing, the deliberate neutrality. “He said being a lot isn’t bad. It’s just a lot.”

He turns back to the stove, to the pork that’s probably getting overdone, to the sauce that needs to be stirred, to the rice that’s been sitting in the cooker for too long. “He said all that, huh?”

“Mm-hmm. He says Papa is like a firework. Very loud and very bright and sometimes scary but mostly beautiful.”

“I’m going to kill him,” Katsuki says, without heat, and Sakura makes a sound that might be a laugh, a small huff of air that’s the closest she usually gets to amusement, and Katsuki’s chest expands with something that feels like it might crack his ribs if he doesn’t let it out somehow.

This is the thing about Aizawa, about his presence in their lives, about the way he’s become something more than a therapist, something more than a former teacher, something that none of them have a word for. He comes to their house twice a month for Sakura’s sessions, sits on the floor of her room or in the backyard or, once, in the bathtub (fully clothed, because Sakura had decided the bathroom was the only place she felt safe talking that day, and Aizawa had simply shrugged and sat down on the bathmat and let her perch on the edge of the tub with her feet in the water, and Katsuki had stood in the hallway with his ear pressed to the door like a lunatic, trying to hear what they were saying). He comes for dinner sometimes, when Izuku insists, and eats with them, and lets Sakura show him her figurines and her drawings and the new trick she learned in gymnastics, and he does it all with the same expression of mild, resigned exhaustion he’s worn since Katsuki first met him, and he does it without asking for anything, without making it weird, without ever once acting like he’s doing them a favor.

And sometimes, when Sakura is having a bad day, when she’s slipped somewhere they can’t reach her and the breathing exercises aren’t working and the grounding techniques are failing and Katsuki is sitting on the floor with his back against her bed, holding her limp, unresponsive hand, trying to remember how to breathe himself, Aizawa will show up. He doesn’t call first, doesn’t text, doesn’t ask if it’s a good time. He just appears in their doorway, still in his capture weapon and his black clothes, looking like he’s been dragged backwards through a hedge, and he sits down on the floor beside Katsuki, and he waits.

He doesn’t say anything, usually. Sometimes he talks to Sakura, in that low, monotone voice that somehow manages to be soothing despite its complete lack of affect, telling her about his cats, about the new stray that showed up at his apartment, about the way it sits on his chest at three in the morning and purrs like a motor and refuses to move until he feeds it. Sometimes he tells stories about Katsuki and Izuku when they were students, the stupid things they did, the fights they got into, the time Katsuki accidentally blew up the kitchen in the dorms and tried to blame it on Kaminari, and Katsuki will sit there, mortified, listening to his former teacher air his teenage embarrassments to his five-year-old daughter, and he’ll feel something loosening in his chest, something that’s been wound too tight for too long.

And Sakura comes back. She always comes back, slowly, incrementally, a blink here, a twitch there, and then she’s looking at them, really looking, and she says something like, “Socks,” because the last thing Aizawa was talking about was the socks his cat stole from his laundry basket, and she’s present again, she’s here, and Katsuki can breathe.

“The grounding works better when there’s another person,” Aizawa told him once, in the kitchen, while Sakura was in the backyard with Izuku, looking at bugs or something, some activity that required Izuku’s particular brand of enthusiasm to make it interesting. “She’s learned to associate your presence with safety. That’s good. That’s the foundation. But sometimes her nervous system needs a different anchor, something that isn’t so closely tied to her daily experience. A third point of reference. It’s not a failure on your part, Bakugou. It’s just how trauma works.”

Katsuki had stood at the sink, washing the same plate for five minutes, and he had said, “I don’t want her to need you.”

And Aizawa, who has never once in his life pulled a punch, who has never softened a truth to make it easier to swallow, had said, “I know. But she does. And you need to be okay with that, because the alternative is her needing no one, and that’s not survival, Bakugou. That’s just a longer, slower way of dying.”

So Katsuki is learning to be okay with it. He is learning to be okay with Aizawa’s presence in their lives, with the way Sakura lights up when he arrives, with the way she calls him “Aizawa-sensei” with the same reverence she used to reserve only for All Might. He is learning to be okay with the fact that his daughter has someone else, someone safe, someone who understands the mechanics of her mind in ways Katsuki will never fully grasp. He is learning to be okay with the jealousy that rises in his throat sometimes, thick and bitter, the part of him that wants to be everything to her, to be enough, to be the only one she needs.

He is learning, because the lessons keep coming, because parenting is an endless education in the things you don’t know, the things you can’t control, the things you have to let go of whether you want to or not.

“Papa,” Sakura says from the table, and he turns, plate in hand, to find her holding up the drawing, the three-in-one figure with its jumble of limbs and its too-big heads, the sun bleeding off the edge of the paper. “This is for you. For your office. So you can look at it when you’re sad.”

“I’m not sad,” he says automatically, and she gives him a look—a look, one that she has clearly learned from Izuku, one that says I know you’re lying and I’m going to let you get away with it but we both know the truth—and he takes the drawing, holds it carefully by the edges so he doesn’t smudge the crayon, and says, “Thank you. I’ll put it on my desk.”

“By the picture of Mama,” she says, because she calls Izuku “Mama” despite the fact that Izuku is very much a man and has been very clear about his pronouns and his identity and everything else, but she had called him that once, early on, before she was talking consistently, and it had stuck, and now Izuku gets a little teary every time she says it, which is approximately fifteen times a day.

“By the picture of Mama,” Katsuki agrees, and he hangs the drawing on the refrigerator first, because he wants to see it while he finishes cooking, and Sakura makes a sound of approval and goes back to her crayons, and the kitchen is quiet again, just the sizzle of pork and the hum of the refrigerator and the soft scratch of crayon on paper.

This is it, he thinks. This is the thing they don’t tell you about, when they talk about parenthood, when they talk about trauma, when they talk about healing. They make it sound like a journey, like a road with a destination, like something you can complete if you just try hard enough, love enough, sacrifice enough. But it’s not a journey. It’s not a road.

It’s a kitchen on a Tuesday evening, with katsudon burning slightly on one side because you were distracted by a drawing, and a five-year-old who draws her family as one person because that’s how she sees you, tangled together, inseparable, and a husband who will be home in two hours, tired and bruised and smelling like the city, who will eat the slightly-burned katsudon and tell you it’s perfect because he’s a terrible liar but a very loving one, and a former teacher who will text you later, probably, just a single message with no context, a cat emoji or a picture of his newest foster cat, something to say I’m here if you need me without ever actually saying it.

It’s not a journey. It’s just a life. It’s just a Tuesday.

And it’s enough. It has to be enough. It is.

He plates the food, sets the table, sits down across from his daughter, and watches her eat her katsudon with the careful, methodical movements of a child who learned early that food might disappear if you didn’t eat it fast enough, and he doesn’t cry, doesn’t show anything on his face except mild impatience when she takes too long chewing, doesn’t let the enormity of it crush him.

But later, when Izuku comes home, when Sakura is asleep and the drawing is on the refrigerator and the dishes are done and they are both too tired for anything except collapsing onto the couch in a heap of limbs and exhaustion, Katsuki will pull out his phone and see the message from Aizawa: a photo of a black cat, curled up on a pile of laundry, with the caption “this one peed on my boots. worth it.” And Katsuki will laugh, actually laugh, and Izuku will look at him with that face, and Katsuki will show him the message, and they will both laugh, and it will be late, and they will be tired, and the apartment will be quiet, and somewhere down the hall, Sakura will be sleeping, dreaming whatever dreams she dreams, present in her own body, anchored in her own life.

And that will be enough. That will have to be enough.

It is.

The thing about having friends, the thing that Katsuki Bakugou has learned, slowly and painfully and against every instinct he was born with— is that they will, without fail, show up at your house unannounced, eat your food, sit on your furniture in ways that definitely violate the structural integrity of said furniture, and act like they’re doing  you  a favor by turning your living room into a chaotic disaster zone that smells like three different kinds of takeout and whatever questionable cologne Kaminari has recently discovered at the bottom of a discount bin.

“I’m just saying,” Kaminari says, sprawled across their couch with his feet on the coffee table, which Katsuki has told him approximately four hundred times not to do, “that if you’re going to make katsudon  again , you could at least make enough for the rest of us. We’re guests. We’re your beloved former classmates. We fought in a war together. I took a bullet for you. Metaphorically. A metaphorical bullet. A very painful metaphorical bullet that—“

“You got hit by a stray rubber band during training and cried for twenty minutes,” Sero says from the armchair, where he’s somehow managed to balance a plate of takoyaki on one knee and a can of soda on the other without spilling anything, a feat of engineering that Katsuki would almost be impressed by if he didn’t know Sero was going to leave the empty can on the windowsill when he left, the way he always did, the way that made Katsuki want to tape it to his forehead.

“It was a very painful rubber band,” Kaminari says, and Kirishima, who is sitting on the floor with his back against the couch because there are literally not enough chairs in the apartment for the seven people who have somehow materialized in the last forty-five minutes, lets out a laugh that shakes the entire room.

“Bro, you screamed like a little girl.”

“I was  startled . There’s a difference.”

Sakura, who has been sitting on the floor in the corner of the living room for the past half hour, methodically lining up her hero figurines in a spiral pattern that winds from the base of the bookshelf to the leg of the coffee table, looks up at this and says, very seriously, “Kaminari-san screams like a cat that got stepped on.”

Kaminari clutches his chest like he’s been shot—an actual shot, not a metaphorical rubber band—and makes a wounded sound that is, Katsuki notes with no small amount of satisfaction,  exactly  like a cat that got stepped on. Kirishima is laughing so hard he’s sliding sideways on the floor, one hand pressed to his stomach, the other reaching out blindly for something to hold onto. Sero has finally broken his streak of non-spillage, takoyaki rolling across the floor, soda fizzing over the edge of the can, and he doesn’t even seem to notice, he’s too busy wheezing. Ashido, who arrived ten minutes ago with a bag of groceries she claimed were “just for her” but which are currently being systematically consumed by everyone in the room, has her face buried in a cushion, her shoulders shaking, and Todoroki—Todoroki, who showed up with a potted plant for some reason and has been standing in the corner of the kitchen for the past twenty minutes like a very confused, very expensive piece of decor—tilts his head and says, “She’s not wrong,” in that flat, clinical voice of his, and Kaminari makes the sound again, entirely on purpose this time, and Kirishima actually falls over, his legs kicking, his face red, his laughter completely silent now because he’s lost the ability to make any sound at all.

It's not that funny, Katsuki thinks. But there's something about kids...

Sakura watches all of this with her wide, unblinking eyes, her face betraying nothing, and then she looks at Katsuki, and there it is: the almost-smile, the softening at the corners of her mouth, the tiny, almost invisible sign that she is pleased, that she has done something she considers funny, that she is, against all odds, enjoying herself.

“Don’t encourage her,” Katsuki says, but he’s fighting his own smile, he’s losing the fight, he’s going to lose it entirely if Kaminari doesn’t stop making that sound, and Sakura knows, she  knows , she’s five years old and she has figured out exactly how to manipulate him and she is not afraid to use her powers.

“Kaminari-san,” she says, and her voice is small and serious and completely deadpan, the same voice she uses to recite facts about hero agencies and ask for extra sauce on her katsudon and inform Katsuki that his laugh sounds like a car that won’t start, “do you want to see my figurines?”

Kaminari, who has finally recovered enough to sit up, looks at her with an expression of such profound gratitude that Katsuki almost feels bad for all the times he’s threatened to blow him up. Almost. “Yes,” Kaminari says, and his voice cracks on the word. “Yes, Sakura-chan, I would love to see your figurines.”

She stands up, moves to the spiral of heroes she’s been constructing for the past half hour, and begins to explain it. She doesn’t do it the way most children would, with excitement and gesturing and demands for attention. She does it the way she does everything: quietly, methodically, on her own terms. She points to each figurine, names it, explains its position in the spiral, the reasoning behind it, the way the pattern moves from the oldest heroes to the newest, from the ones who fight up close to the ones who fight from a distance, and Katsuki watches his former classmates watch her, and he sees the moment they all understand, the moment they all see what he and Izuku see every day: that she is brilliant, that she is careful, that she is building a world she can control, one figurine at a time.

“That’s so cool,” Kirishima says, and his voice is rough, rougher than a conversation about hero figurines requires, and Katsuki looks at him, at the way his eyes are fixed on Sakura, at the way his hands are clasped in his lap like he’s holding himself back from something, and he remembers that Kirishima has a daughter too, now, a girl named Hikari who is six years old and has Kirishima’s laugh and Ashido’s energy and a tendency to set things on fire when she gets upset, which she got from neither of them but which everyone has politely agreed not to comment on.

He remembers that Kirishima adopted her two years ago, the same year Katsuki and Izuku got Sakura, that they had sat in this very living room, Kirishima with his hands wrapped around a cup of tea that was going cold, and said, “I don’t know if I can do this, bro. I don’t know if I’m—what if I’m not—what if I’m not enough for her?” and Katsuki had looked at him, at the man who had stood beside him through a war, who had believed in him when he shouldn't have, who had never once wavered in his faith that Katsuki could be better, and he had said, “You’re the stupidest person I’ve ever met, and you’re going to be a great dad,” and Kirishima had cried, and Katsuki had pretended not to notice, and now, two years later, Kirishima is sitting on the floor of his living room, watching Sakura explain her figurine spiral, and he has that look on his face, the look that Katsuki recognizes on his own.

“Hikari-chan would love this,” Kirishima says, and his voice is steadier now, stronger, the voice he uses when he’s talking about his daughter, the voice that makes him sound like he’s holding something precious, something fragile, something he can’t quite believe he’s been trusted with. “She’s really into the organization stuff too. She color-codes her hero cards. By quirk type. And then by—by aesthetic. She says aesthetics are important.”

“She’s right,” Sakura says, and she picks up the Endeavor figurine—the new one, the one that came out after the war, the one that shows him with his flames low and his head bowed, the one that Katsuki had stared at in the store for a long time before putting it in the basket—and moves it from the outer spiral to the inner spiral, and Katsuki watches her adjust the pattern, watches her find a place for something that doesn’t quite fit, and he thinks about Aizawa’s words, about building a foundation, about creating reasons to stay.

“Sakura-chan,” Ashido says, and she’s crawled off the couch and is sitting on the floor now, her face level with Sakura’s, her voice the careful, gentle voice she uses when she’s talking to children, which is the same voice she uses when she’s talking to Kaminari, which Katsuki has never pointed out to her because he values his life. “Do you think Hikari-chan could come over sometime? To see your figurines? She doesn’t have a lot of friends who like organizing as much as she does. Most of her friends just want to play fight, and she’s—she’s not really into that.”

Sakura considers this. She considers it for a long time, her face blank, her hands still, and Katsuki can see her processing, can see her weighing the variables, can see her trying to decide if this is something she wants, something she can handle, something she has the capacity for. He wants to jump in, wants to say  she doesn’t have to, she doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do , but he doesn’t, because that’s one of the things he’s learned, one of the things Aizawa has drilled into his head: she has to make her own choices, she has to be the one to decide, she has to learn that she has control over her own life, her own body, her own yes and no.

“Maybe,” Sakura says, finally, and it’s not a yes, but it’s not a no, and Ashido’s face lights up like she’s just been handed the sun. “Maybe she can come. If she likes organizing. And if she doesn’t touch the figurines without asking.”

“She won’t,” Kirishima says, and his voice is fierce, fierce in the way he gets when he’s talking about his daughter, fierce in the way he’s always been, the way that made Katsuki trust him, the way that made Katsuki believe that maybe, maybe, he could be something other than what he was. “She knows the rules. We have rules about touching things. She has—she has her own rules. She likes rules. She likes—she likes knowing what’s going to happen.”

Katsuki looks at Kirishima, and Kirishima looks back, and they don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say, because they both understand: the war took things from all of them, took parents and homes and the easy, uncomplicated childhoods they should have had, and now they’re all building something new, something out of the wreckage, something that looks like families made of people who chose each other, who keep choosing each other, who will never stop choosing each other.

“You guys are depressing,” Kaminari announces, and he’s sprawled on the couch again, his feet back on the coffee table, a piece of takoyaki in each hand, and Katsuki is going to kill him, he’s going to actually kill him, and Izuku is going to be mad, and Sakura is going to be sad, and it’s going to be worth it, it’s going to be so worth it. “We’re supposed to be having fun. We’re supposed to be hanging out. We’re supposed to be eating Katsuki’s food and making fun of Shouto for bringing a plant to someone’s house like he’s attending a dinner party in a period drama.”

Todoroki, who has not moved from his position in the kitchen corner, looks down at the plant in his hands—a small, slightly wilted-looking succulent in a ceramic pot that has a cartoon cat face painted on it—and says, “It’s a housewarming gift. They’ve been here for two years. I’m late.”

“You’re always late,” Sero says, and he’s finally picked up the takoyaki that rolled onto the floor and is examining it with the expression of a man who is considering whether the five-second rule applies to food that has rolled across a floor that has been walked on by approximately seven heroes, one child, and an unknown number of cats that Katsuki has definitely not been letting into the apartment despite Sakura’s repeated requests. “Remember graduation? You showed up an hour after it ended. They had to give you your diploma in the parking lot.”

“There was a villain attack,” Todoroki says, and his voice is calm, placid, the voice he uses when he’s stating facts that are completely unassailable, like the sky is blue and water is wet and he is, inexplicably, still friends with people who make fun of him for bringing succulents to apartments that were housewarmed two years ago.

“There’s always a villain attack,” Kaminari says. “That’s not an excuse. That’s a lifestyle.”

Sakura, who has returned to her spiral and is now adding the All Might figurine that Katsuki definitely didn’t buy her last week (he bought it, he bought it the moment he saw it, he bought it and he gave it to her and he pretended it was from Izuku because he didn’t want her to know how weak he is, how easily he crumbles when she looks at something for more than three seconds), looks up and says, “Todoroki-san, why did you bring a plant?”

Everyone looks at Todoroki. Todoroki looks at the plant. The plant, which is a succulent, which are famously hard to kill, which Katsuki is pretty sure Todoroki chose specifically because he knows that Katsuki has managed to kill every plant Izuku has ever brought into the apartment, looks back at Todoroki with its tiny, unblinking succulent eyes.

“I thought it would be nice,” Todoroki says, and there’s something in his voice, something that might be uncertainty, something that might be the same thing Katsuki feels when he buys Sakura a new figurine and pretends it’s from Izuku. “It’s a succulent. They’re hard to kill. I thought—you have a child now. A child who might want to learn about plants. Plants are good for children. They teach responsibility. And—and they’re alive. It’s good for children to be around things that are alive.”

The room is very quiet. Kaminari has stopped chewing. Ashido has her hand pressed to her mouth, and her eyes are wet, and Sero is looking at the ceiling like it’s suddenly the most interesting thing he’s ever seen, and Katsuki realizes, with a start, that Todoroki is talking about his own childhood, about the cold house and the cold father and the mother who wasn’t there, about the things he didn’t have, the things he’s trying to give to other people’s children now, because he doesn’t have his own, because he’s not ready, because he’s still working on the things that were broken in him long before the war.

“That’s really thoughtful, Shouto-kun,” Izuku says, and Katsuki didn’t even realize Izuku had come out of the bedroom, but there he is, standing in the hallway, his hair still damp from the shower, wearing the All Might t-shirt that Katsuki has been trying to throw away for three years, and he’s smiling that smile, the one that makes Katsuki’s chest hurt, “We can put it in Sakura’s room. By the window. She can help water it.”

Sakura, who has been watching this exchange with her unreadable face, stands up, walks over to Todoroki, and looks up at him. She looks at him for a long time, the way she looks at things she’s trying to understand, the way she looked at Katsuki in the visitation room, the way she looked at the katsudon the first time she ate it, the way she looks at the hero figurines before she places them in her patterns.

“What’s its name?” she asks.

Todoroki blinks. “The plant?”

“Yes.”

“I—I didn’t give it a name. I’m sorry. I should have—do you want to give it a name?”

Sakura considers this. She considers it with the same intensity she brings to everything, the same intensity that makes Katsuki want to wrap her in bubble wrap and never let anyone else near her, the same intensity that makes him proud and terrified in equal measure.

“Mochi,” she says, finally. “The plant’s name is Mochi.”

“Mochi,” Todoroki repeats, and there’s something in his voice, something that might be wonder, something that might be the same thing Katsuki felt when she held out her hand to him, something that might be the beginning of something, the start of a thread that will tie them together, that will make Todoroki a person who brings plants to children’s houses and asks about their names and remembers, always, that she chose him to name it, that she trusted him with something small and alive and green.

“Mochi,” Sakura says, firmly, and she takes the pot from Todoroki’s hands, careful, methodical, and carries it to the windowsill, where she places it next to the drawing of her family, the three-in-one figure with the sun bleeding off the edge of the paper, and Katsuki watches her, and he thinks about Todoroki’s words, about being around things that are alive, and he thinks about all the children they’ve collected, all the orphans of the war, all the small, broken things that are learning to grow in the light of people who chose them, who keep choosing them, who will never stop choosing them.

The doorbell rings.

“Who the hell—” Katsuki starts, and then the door opens, because nobody in this godforsaken friend group has ever waited for him to answer the door, because they all have keys, because they all feel entitled to his space and his food and his patience, which he has in limited supply, which they are depleting at an alarming rate.

“We brought takoyaki,” Uraraka announces, sweeping into the apartment with the same energy she brings to everything, which is to say the energy of a small, determined hurricane. She’s holding a bag of takeout in each hand and has another bag dangling from her mouth, and behind her, Asui is carrying a tray of drinks, her tongue wrapped around the handle, her expression placid, and behind  her , Iida is—Iida is holding a spreadsheet.

“I’ve created a schedule,” Iida says, and his voice is the same voice he’s always had, the voice that brooks no argument, the voice that organized their class through a war, that coordinated rescue efforts, that somehow, impossibly, kept them all alive. “For visitation. So that everyone gets equal time with Sakura-chan without overwhelming her. I’ve factored in her therapy schedule, her school schedule, and the recommended maximum number of social interactions per week based on Aizawa-sensei’s guidance. There’s also a section for meal planning, because I’ve noticed that Katsuki has been cooking for everyone who comes over and that’s not sustainable, so I’ve created a rotation.”

Katsuki stares at him. He stares at Iida, who is holding a color-coded spreadsheet with what appears to be twelve tabs, who has somehow managed to take the chaos of their friend group and turn it into something organized, something manageable, something that looks, for a moment, like it might actually work.

“You’re fuckin' insane,” Katsuki says, and Iida beams.

“Thank you! I’ve also created a group chat for scheduling purposes. Ochaco has already added everyone. Please respond to the poll about preferred meal options by Thursday. Katsuki, you’re exempt from cooking duty for the next three weeks as compensation for the emotional labor you’ve been performing. Kirishima has volunteered to take over, and Denki has volunteered to assist, which I’ve noted may require supervision.”

“I can cook,” Kaminari says, and everyone in the room, including Sakura, who has never seen Kaminari cook anything, including Todoroki, who has been standing in the kitchen corner for forty-five minutes and hasn’t moved, including Mochi the succulent, who is a plant and doesn’t have opinions about anything, makes a sound of profound disagreement.

“I can  help  cook,” Kaminari amends. “I can chop things. I’m very good at chopping things.”

“You chopped your own finger last week,” Sero says. “You sent a picture to the group chat. It was bleeding. A lot.”

“That was a one-time thing. The knife was dull. It slipped.”

“The knife was dull because you used it to open a package of batteries. The batteries were for a toy you bought for yourself. The toy was for ages three and up.”

“Age recommendations are  guidelines , Sero. They’re not—they’re not hard rules. A man can have a toy that’s meant for a child. A man can—a man can have joy. In this economy. In this post-war society. A man can have a toy that lights up and makes sounds and is shaped like a—like a—it’s shaped like a hero. It’s hero merch. It’s hero merch that happens to be marketed toward children. That’s not my fault. That’s the marketing team’s fault.”

Sakura, who has been watching this exchange with her usual unreadable expression, says, “Kaminari-san, I have a toy that’s for ages three and up. Do you want to see it?”

Kaminari looks like he might cry. “Yes,” he says, and his voice cracks again, and Katsuki is going to have to explain to Sakura later that she can’t just offer to show people her toys every time they say something stupid, because they will all say yes, they will all want to see, they will all be exactly as pathetic as Kaminari is right now, and Katsuki does not have the emotional capacity to watch his entire friend group be undone by a five-year-old’s hero merch.

“It’s a transforming All Might figure,” Sakura says, and she’s already walking toward her room, and Kaminari is following her, and Kirishima is following Kaminari, and Ashido is following Kirishima, and Sero is pretending he’s not following anyone but he’s definitely following, and Uraraka has dropped the takoyaki bags on the counter and is also following, and Asui is following Uraraka, and Iida is standing in the middle of the living room, holding his spreadsheet, looking like he’s trying to decide whether socialization is part of the schedule or if this counts as an unscheduled interaction that needs to be documented.

“You can go,” Katsuki says, and Iida looks at him, and for a moment, just a moment, his face softens, and he looks so young, not thirty-five something, the way it used to soften when they were students, when the war was just starting, when they were all so young and so scared and so determined to be something other than what the world was trying to make them.

“I’ll stay,” Iida says, and he sits down on the couch, the spreadsheet in his lap, and he looks at Katsuki with the same expression he’s always had, the expression that says  I see you, I see what you’re carrying, and I’m here, I’m not going anywhere.

“You don’t have to,” Katsuki says.

“I know,” Iida says, and he looks down at his spreadsheet, at the color-coded tabs, at the careful, meticulous planning of a man who lost his brother to a war that should never have happened, who has spent his life trying to bring order to chaos, who is sitting in his friend’s living room on a Tuesday night, holding a schedule for a child who isn’t his, making sure that everyone gets a turn, that no one is forgotten, that everything is fair.

“You made a schedule,” Katsuki says, and he doesn’t know why his voice sounds like that, why it sounds like he’s accusing Iida of something, why it sounds like he’s about to cry, which he is not, which he will never do in front of Iida, which he will never do in front of anyone, ever, especially not on a Tuesday.

“I made a schedule,” Iida says, and his voice is steady, steady as his hands, steady as the way he’s always been, the way that kept them all alive, the way that made him the leader they needed, the way that makes him the friend Katsuki doesn’t deserve, the friend he has anyway, the friend who is sitting on his couch, holding a spreadsheet, waiting for him to be okay.

“It’s a good schedule,” Katsuki says, and the words come out like a confession, like an admission of something he didn’t know he was holding, and Iida looks at him, and his face does that thing, that softening, that opening, and Katsuki looks away, because he can’t, because it’s too much, because there are too many people in his apartment and too many emotions in his chest and too many years of knowing these people, of fighting beside them, of watching them lose things and find things and build things out of the wreckage.

“Katsuki,” Iida says, and his voice is gentle, and the name on his tongue feels right, and Katsuki wants to tell him to stop, wants to tell him to go look at Sakura’s figurines with everyone else, wants to be alone, wants to not be alone, wants to be anywhere but here, anywhere but in this living room with this spreadsheet and this man and this family he didn’t ask for, the family he has anyway, the family that keeps showing up, that keeps taking his food and sitting on his furniture and bringing him plants and schedules and takoyaki and the relentless, unstoppable weight of their love.

“Don’t,” Katsuki says, and Iida doesn’t, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move, just sits there, holding his spreadsheet, being present, being there, being exactly what Katsuki needs even though Katsuki can’t say it, can’t admit it, can’t be soft the way Izuku is soft, can’t be open the way Kirishima is open, can’t be anything other than what he is: a man who is learning, slowly, painfully, to let people in.

From Sakura’s room, he can hear Kaminari’s voice, high and excited, and Kirishima’s laugh, loud and full, and Ashido’s squeal, and Sero’s commentary, and Uraraka’s encouragement, and Asui’s quiet observations, and Todoroki’s occasional, deadpan interjections, and Sakura’s voice, small and serious, explaining the patterns, explaining the rules, explaining the world she’s building, one figurine at a time.

And Katsuki sits on the couch beside Iida, and he looks at the schedule, the color-coded tabs, the careful planning, the evidence that someone cares, that someone has thought about them, about Sakura, about what she needs, about how to give it to her without overwhelming her, without taking away her choices, without making her feel like she’s not in control.

“You put Aizawa-sensei on the schedule,” Katsuki says, and Iida nods.

“He’s part of her support system. He should have designated time. I’ve blocked out Thursday afternoons. He said that works for him. He also said, and I quote, ‘Tell Bakugou I’m not cooking, I’m bringing takeout, and if anyone tries to make me socialize I’m leaving.’ I’ve noted that in the comments section.”

Katsuki laughs. He laughs, and it’s the laugh Sakura says sounds like a car that won’t start, and Iida doesn’t comment on it, doesn’t look at him, doesn’t do anything except sit there, solid and steady, holding the schedule, holding the space, holding everything together the way he’s always done, the way he’ll always do, because that’s who Iida is, that’s who they all are, that’s what they learned from a war that tried to break them and failed.

“You’re all idiots,” Katsuki says, but there’s no heat in it, there’s never any heat in it when he says it to them, not anymore, not after everything. “You’re all idiots and you’re all in my house and you’re all eating my food and you’re all going to clean up before you leave or I swear to God I will blow up every single one of you.”

“Noted,” Iida says, and he makes a notation on his spreadsheet, and Katsuki watches him, and he thinks about all the children they’ve collected, all the orphans of the war, all the small, broken things that are learning to grow in the light of people who chose them, who keep choosing them, who will never stop choosing them.

He thinks about Kirishima’s daughter, Hikari, who sets things on fire when she gets upset and color-codes her hero cards by aesthetic and has Kirishima’s laugh and Ashido’s energy and a future that’s brighter than the past she came from.

He thinks about the twins Rina and Ren, who were a month old when their parents — Ashido's cousin died, and are three and a half and never stop moving, never stop talking, never stop demanding attention, never stop being exactly what Ashido needed after everything she lost.

He thinks about Kaminari’s son, Kenji, who is four years old and speaks three languages and has nightmares about things that happened before he was born, things he shouldn’t remember, things that live in his blood like a inheritance no one asked for.

He thinks about Sero’s foster kids, the ones he takes in for a month or a year or as long as they need, the ones who leave and come back and leave again, the ones who call him on the phone at three in the morning and he always, always answers.

He thinks about Uraraka, who adopted a teenager, a fourteen-year-old girl who had been in the system for ten years, who had given up on being chosen, who had learned to make herself small, to make herself invisible, to make herself something that didn’t need to be chosen, and Uraraka had looked at her and said, “You’re not too old. You’re not too much. You’re exactly what I wanted,” and the girl had cried, and Uraraka had cried, and now she’s in middle school and she has friends and she’s learning to take up space, to be seen, to be loved.

He thinks about Asui, who took in her younger siblings after their parents died in the war, who had been parentified her whole life and just kept doing it, just kept showing up, just kept being the steady, reliable presence that everyone needed, that everyone still needs, that will probably be there for all of them until the end of time. He thinks about Todoroki, who is still working on himself, who is still healing, who isn’t ready to be a parent yet, who shows up with plants and gifts and the careful, deliberate effort of a man who is learning to love, to be loved, to exist in a world that has given him so many reasons not to trust it.

He thinks about Izuku, who grew up without a father and a lovely but tired mother, who has more love in him than seems possible, who pours it into Sakura, into Katsuki, into all of them, who never runs out, who never stops giving, who is standing in the hallway right now, watching Katsuki with those green eyes, those knowing eyes, those eyes that have seen him at his worst and stayed, that have seen him at his best and stayed, that will see him tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, and stay, always stay.

“Hey,” Izuku says, and he crosses the room, sits on the other side of Katsuki, takes his hand, the way he always does, the way he’s been doing for so long that Katsuki doesn’t remember what it felt like before, doesn’t want to remember, doesn’t need to.

He thinks of himself too now, for in Izuku's hands he has the heart to be a little bit selfish, and so he thinks of his dear old hag, and sweet old dad — gone too soon. 

“Hey,” Katsuki says back, and it’s not much, it’s never much, but it’s enough, it’s always been enough, it will always be enough.

From Sakura’s room, there’s a crash, and then a moment of silence, and then Kaminari’s voice, high and panicked: “It fell. It fell but I caught it. I caught it. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. The figurine is fine. I’m fine. We’re all fine.”

“Which figurine,” Sakura’s voice, small and serious and carrying the weight of a judgment that will determine the fate of Kaminari’s soul.

“The—the little one. The one with the—the one that looks like—it’s fine. I caught it. I caught it before it hit the ground. I have very fast reflexes. I’m a hero. I have hero reflexes.”

“That’s the Silver Age All Might,” Sakura says, and her voice hasn’t changed, hasn’t risen, hasn’t done anything except state a fact, but everyone in the room, including Katsuki, including Iida, including Izuku, knows that Kaminari is in danger, that he has committed a transgression that may never be forgiven, that he will be thinking about this moment for the rest of his life, that he will wake up in the middle of the night, three years from now, and hear her voice saying  that’s the Silver Age All Might  and feel the shame all over again.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” Kaminari says, and his voice is desperate, pleading, the voice of a man who knows he has made a terrible mistake and is trying to fix it, trying to make it right, trying to do anything to earn back the trust he has lost. “I’ll buy you ten new ones. I’ll buy you the whole collection. I’ll—I’ll go to the store right now. Right now. I’ll go. I’ll be back in twenty minutes. There’s a store that’s open late. I know the owner. He knows me. He gives me discounts because I’m a hero. Because I’m—because I’m a hero who shops there. Frequently. For things that are definitely for me and not for—not for children. For adult things. Adult hero merch. For adults.”

“Kaminari,” Kirishima’s voice, trying to be soothing, trying to calm him down, trying to prevent a situation where one of Japan’s pro heroes is arrested for breaking into a toy store at nine o’clock at night. “Kaminari, bro, it’s okay. She said it’s fine. She said you caught it. It’s not broken. Everything’s okay.”

“She said  that’s the Silver Age All Might ,” Kaminari hisses, and his voice is the voice of a man who has seen the face of God and found it wanting, who has looked into the abyss and the abyss has said  that’s the Silver Age All Might  in a small, serious voice that will haunt his dreams forever. “You don’t understand. That’s the—that’s the limited edition. That’s the one that came out last year. That’s the one that—that’s her favorite. She told me. She told me it was her favorite. She showed me all of them and she said  this one is my favorite  and I—I dropped it. I dropped her favorite. I dropped the Silver Age All Might. I’m—I’m a monster. I’m a villain. I’m worse than Shigaraki. Shigaraki never dropped anyone’s Silver Age All Might. Probably. I don’t know. He probably didn’t. He was evil but he wasn’t—he wasn’t a monster.”

Katsuki closes his eyes. He closes his eyes and he listens to his friends, his family, his people, the ones who survived, the ones who chose to live, the ones who are in his apartment on a Tuesday night, arguing about a limited edition figurine and making schedules and bringing plants and being, somehow, impossibly, exactly what he needs.

“I should go help him,” Kirishima says, and there’s the sound of movement, of Kirishima standing up, of Kaminari’s continued panicked breathing in the background, of Ashido’s laughter, of Sero’s commentary, of Uraraka’s reassurances, of Asui’s quiet, steady presence, of Todoroki’s deadpan interjections, of Sakura’s small, serious voice explaining, again, the rules of the figurines, the patterns, the order of things.

“He’ll be fine,” Izuku says, and his hand is warm in Katsuki’s, his shoulder pressed against Katsuki’s shoulder, his breath steady, his heart steady, his love steady, always steady. “She likes him. She’s not going to hold it against him.”

“She’s going to hold it against him for the rest of his life,” Katsuki says, and there’s something in his voice, something that might be pride, something that might be affection, something that might be the same thing he feels every time Sakura opens her mouth and says something devastating, something true, something that's kind of mean and it sounds like him and he likes it. She needs to be atleast a little bit like him to survive in a world like this. “She’s never going to let him forget it. She’s going to bring it up at his wedding. She’s going to bring it up at his funeral. She’s going to be ninety years old and she’s going to say  remember when you dropped the Silver Age All Might  and he’s going to flinch.”

“He is,” Izuku agrees, and he’s smiling, Katsuki can hear it in his voice, can see it in the corner of his eye, can feel it in the way his hand squeezes Katsuki’s, warm and sure and alive. 

“Good,” Katsuki says.

From Sakura’s room, there’s a moment of quiet, and then Sakura’s voice, small and clear: “Kaminari-san, it’s okay. You can look at the other ones now. But maybe sit down first. So you don’t fall.”

“I’m sitting,” Kaminari says, and his voice is still shaky, still uncertain, but there’s something else there now, something that might be relief, something that might be the beginning of forgiveness. “I’m sitting. I’m on the floor. I’m not going to fall. I’m not going to drop anything. I’m going to be very, very still. I’m going to be so still that I become part of the floor. I’m going to—I’m going to be a floor person. A floor person who doesn’t move and doesn’t drop things and doesn’t—doesn’t disappoint anyone.”

“You’re being dram-atic,” Sakura says, and there’s something in her voice, something that might be amusement, something that might be the same thing Katsuki feels when he watches her figure out the world, piece by piece, pattern by pattern, learning what it means to be with people, to trust people, to let people be part of her spiral.

“I’m not being dramatic,” Kaminari says, and he’s definitely being dramatic, he’s always dramatic, he’s been dramatic since the day Katsuki met him, he’ll be dramatic until the day he dies, and Katsuki loves him for it, loves all of them for it, loves this ridiculous, impossible, wonderful family they’ve built from the wreckage of a war that should have destroyed them.

“You’re being dramatic,” Kirishima says, and there’s laughter in his voice, and there’s love in his voice, and there’s the sound of him sitting down on the floor beside Kaminari, beside Sakura, beside all of them. “But it’s okay. We’re all dramatic. It’s a hero thing. We’re dramatic and we’re loud and we’re a lot, and we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.”

And Katsuki, sitting on the couch between Izuku and Iida, listening to his friends in his daughter’s room, looking at the schedule in Iida’s lap, the plant on the windowsill, the drawing on the refrigerator, thinks that maybe this world is gonna be okay. Even if his parents are not in it anymore.