Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Midoriya Izumi is born wailing.

A crying waif of a girl with eyes like copper-sulfate flames and magic bubbling hot and bright beneath her skin.

Inko stares, exhausted and flushed with the glow of new motherhood, down at her beautiful baby girl cradled in her arms. Her family gathers in close, yelling and jostling for a glimpse at their newest addition. 

She runs her pinkie finger down her daughter’s short stub of a nose, sweeps it under her fragile eye and over the bright apple of her chubby cheek all in one smooth motion. Izumi quiets almost immediately, and her big, green eyes stare up at Inko with far too much intelligence for a freshly born babe to have.

But, well, Izumi is no normal infant.

"Welcome to the world," Inko whispers over the shouts around her. Such a joyous occasion this is, she can’t fault them for yipping and barking in celebration. "It will shake beneath your feet, haim shelli ."

***

The family celebrates for three days following Izumi’s birth, as tradition dictates. One day for love, one day for health, and one day for magic.

The celebration on the third day is very large indeed, for they have much to celebrate for.

***

Quickly after the festivities stop, Izumi is bundled and tucked away into the nursery carefully placed in the heart of the house, where she will always be surrounded by family.

Her room is decorated in forest greens and honey soft golds, filled with books and toys and many, many chairs for the steady stream of visitors she sees every day. There’s not a moment in her life where Izumi wonders if she is loved because it is painted in every crack and seam of her world.

Even still tender with infancy and so ignorant to the world and how it works (but learning, oh, how quickly she learns) she knows this. She knows it as she knows to breathe and to blink and to cry.

Izumi Midoriya is loved.

***

Everyone in town knows the Midoriyas. The family has lived in Musutafu for generations, as woven into the land as the roads and rivers and rice fields are. Their house rests on the highest hill, an old shrine turned manor with the wide span of the forest at their back and the town at their feet.

Midoriya Manor, the townspeople call it. A throne or watchtower or ghost dwelling, depending on the rumor and gossip.

Everyone knows the Midoriyas, but no one really knows a Midoriya, not really. They’re all friendly and kind and just a bit strange, but distant, just like their house on the hill. A little separated from the rest of the small town.

Not, of course, for anyone’s lack of trying.

***

Izumi’s first word is momma.

Her second is why?

Her third is how?

Such a curious child, with questions spinning and whirling behind her eyes too fast to keep up with. She babbles non-stop, not quite words falling from her lips quicker than anyone can keep up with, including herself.

She cries when the skulk can’t understand her. Cries when her thoughts move too quickly for her to keep up with. Cries when she’s frustrated, hungry, sad, happy—cries and cries and cries.

All children cry when they’re young, but Midoriya Izumi never gets the memo to stop.

It becomes her most favored form of communication. And when you live in a house half bursting with yōkai who can smell the different chemicals in your tears and hear the stuttering of your heartbeat, it’s not a terribly inefficient way to do things.

She does just fine, all things considered.

***

Sha’alim jinn are born mostly human, minus the ears and tail. It’s not until they're older that the speed comes in or the strange affinity for words and Promises. It’s not until later still that the magic in their veins begin to awaken, to press outwards and inwards with a suffocatingly affectionate weight, possessive in all things it deems to own.

At least, it shouldn’t.

It’s a good thing Inko had already been planning to be a stay at home mother, because Izumi is barely a year old when the magic around her becomes thick and real. It clings to her in a way it hasn’t touched any of the skulk in years - not since the curse that was meant to kill their line failed at finishing the job.

But Izumi is the first child born to the Midoriya skulk in a decade; is the first shual jinni in even longer. The curse hadn’t managed to kill them, but it left its scars. Perhaps this is the skulk healing or perhaps Izumi was always meant to be strange and different, regardless of curses. Prodigies, after all, are not uncommon for those with Midoriya blood running through their veins.

Inko worries either way it may be, because she knows the way magic clings to her daughter’s soul and Fate sits in her shadow. She’d seen it before in a man who was taken before she ever really got to have him. It doesn’t matter how much They may love Their avatars, it never stops those heroes of myth and legend from shattering beneath the weight of their destiny.

One day, Izumi will burn for that life. Inko knows she will be a hero people write epics about.

But not all epics are happy, most are tragedies, and that’s what worries her. Her daughter is bright and clever and beloved and it still may not be enough.

But those are worries Inko can push away for now, while Izumi is small and innocent and content with the world only being as wide as her family. It hurts, just a bit, but there’s mostly pride and affection bubbling in her chest as little Izumi grows and grows and grows .

***

Sat on Auntie Umi’s lap, Izumi hums without a care in the world.

Her Auntie’s long, hand-done, goddess braids are carefully piled atop her head, safely out of reach of Izumi’s curious toddler hands which have instead latched onto the string of glass beads hanging around her Auntie’s neck. There are dozens of them carefully threaded onto the necklace, each a unique size, shape and color, and even more woven into her Auntie’s hair.

As Izumi touches them she knows—not sure how or why, but she knows —that they aren’t normal beads. Her fingers jolt at their touch and if she looks close, she can see they glow just faintly.

Everyone in the family has some. Prettily coloured not-beads hanging from necks and hair and ears.

Nona has the most of them all. Her arms and silvered braids jangle and clack with all the jewelry she carries, but her neck stays bare save the single pendant around her throat.

She asks then, because she’s never been good at keeping her words or questions to herself--all her ideas and thoughts too big and too many to keep neatly tucked away inside her head.

Uncle Kyo says that’s going to get her into trouble someday. He says that a quiet fox is a clever fox, but Izumi doesn’t think that sounds quite right. Why be quiet when she has so much to say? Isn’t it cleverer to get it all out?

“They’re Promises, little kit.” Auntie Umi carefully untangles her fingers from the strings before playfully nipping at them and making her laugh. “Favors and debts and prizes I’ve won fair and square.”

“Like in a game?”

“Yes. I suppose,” Auntie Umi smiles in that way Izumi knows to mean she’s only kind of right. “It is quite like a game.”

***

Once she’s old enough to walk around town without the skulk worrying she’ll say something she shouldn’t or take off her glamour or do blatant magic in front of the townspeople, Izumi captures the townspeople's hearts with startling ease. They quickly grow used to having her underfoot, always running about and asking questions and unintentionally causing mischief wherever she turns.

She’s such a curious and bright child. Spends hours upon hours reading any book she can get her hands on. Her eyes are a constant flicker of green, taking in everything around her with a sharpness no toddler should have.

Watching, learning, remembering— gorging herself on knowledge of any kind.

The librarians start to recognize and dote on her, so ardent in her pursuit of knowledge. They regularly give her treats and gifts, things Izumi takes and then repays as quickly as possible by helping to reshelve books or run errands or speak to the pixies living in the shelves to give back what they took when someone loses something valuable.

(“You are not fae,” her Nona says, “so your actions and words do not bind you. But we are sha’alim jinn and we honor our debts just as we make sure others honor theirs. Debts hold power, nechdati. Always remember that.”)

She’s the town darling and Inko gets invite after invite for playdates with the handful of other kids Izumi’s age. Izumi always comes back home with more beads on her arms when she plays with the other kids.

Inko watches as she puts each one on her left wrist, never looking at them again, and finds herself smiling for no reason she can discern.

***

Izumi has two names: the one she's allowed to tell people and the real one.

Well, they’re both real, she supposes. Just in different ways.

The secret one though—the one she’s never told anyone because it’s the one written on her soul—that one has power.

All names have power, of course. It’s why foxes have two and why The Good Neighbors are so careful to never speak their own and why demons have none, angelic names burned and lost in the Fall.

But the secret name Izumi holds close to her heart, always so careful to protect, that one has power all on its own. Only her mother and Nona know it. Her mother, because she gave it to her, and Nona because she is Matriarch, leader and protector of them all. It’s her right to know it, just as it is Izumi’s to do with as she pleases.

It’s an Olde Name. One that is written only in the hearts of storytellers and hidden quietly in the wishes of victims yet to be saved.

Anyone can understand what it means. Somewhere in the back of their minds where instinct and history live, they know this name. The translation, should one know the path they must walk for this truth, would be easy.

Savior.

***

Izumi is four and the weight of names and promises so ignorantly given, press behind her teeth like bile. She has dozens of beads on her left wrist, pretty and light and jangling with names she doesn’t want. Promises she didn’t earn.

Her mother tells her the townspeople don’t know what they give away with their words. She tells her they can’t feel the weight of Magic on their skin like she can, binding them with each careless word.

Izumi doesn’t like that at all. Those poor people, deaf to even the bright magic floating all around them everyday. It makes her want to protect them. To keep them safe from those that would use their ignorance against them.

When she tells this to her mother, Inko smiles though it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

“How tiny you are for such large ambitions,” she tells Izumi and playfully taps her nose, causing it to wrinkle. 

“I’ll grow!” Izumi insists, chest puffing out and tail fluffing to twice its normal size. “I’ll grow big and strong and I’ll be able to save everyone.”

“Yes,” her mom says, with that same sad smile. “Just like All Might, right?”

Izumi giggles and cheers at being compared to her hero, her idol, and in her chest, Inko’s heart remains steady. Because Inko has known this since Izumi was born. From that first moment her beautiful daughter had drawn breath, Inko had known. For all that Izumi seems so small and fragile now, one day…

One day Midoriya Izumi will be mighty.

***

There’s something strange about Izumi’s family.

She’s always known they aren’t quite normal, of course. They are yōkai while the town is not and that makes them different. Instead of bedtime stories, Izumi has illusions and glamours while normal dinner conversation consists of riddles and puzzles and switching between languages that have never touched mortal lips.

So, no, not normal. But there’s something else. Something no one ever tells her about.

She asks why she can’t go outside without hiding her tail and ears under the heady magics of a glamour, asks why she can’t speak about Nona or the outings they all have in the forest. She asks and asks and asks about why they must keep so many secrets, why she always has to lie.

The only answer she ever really gets is: “So we can stay safe, ahuva.”

Nobody ever tells her what they’re supposed to be staying safe from.

***

The magic of sha’alim jinn twists and reshapes like smoke on the wind. They are not proud dragons who hold their magic in throats and stomachs, nor are they Nephilim, rigid and solid and overflowing with power.

It takes a powerful magic user to bind a Fox, masters of trickery and loopholes who can wiggle out of malicious enchantments with ease. And to subdue an entire skulk of Foxes, well…

The Takanashi clan may have been powerful hunters in their own rights, backed by numbers if not skill, but they were no Grand Coven. The Midoriya skulk, who once ruled the yōkai of Japan, may have been weakened, but they had not become the rotting corpses the hunters had hoped for.

The Midoriya skulk survived their attack and it was the last mistake the Takanashi Clan ever made.

***

You do not wrong the Yōkai. Not if you’re smart, not if you wish to live happily.

Not if you wish to live.

***

Izumi is quirkless.

It’s not a surprise as it might’ve been in any other family. It’s practically expected when there’s so much other in her veins. Quirks are human things and yōkai blood is thick. It’s a rare thing indeed for a quirk to awaken when magic is at play. And Izumi is nothing if not bursting with magic.

It winds around her greedily and nips at her heels. It is her birthright as a Midoriya, something not even the Takanashi’s irritating curse she only vaguely knows about can interfere with.

But magic is not a quirk, and it’s tricky for one to pass as the other. Perhaps the townspeople would not look so closely, but the Midoriyas are forced to worry about more than the townspeople. There are a handful of Takanashi’s they had not managed to kill and others still who would take advantage of their vulnerability. 

So, three months after Izumi’s fourth birthday, Inko tells everyone the amazing news: “The nose gave her away, of course,” she says smiling. “Smelled the candy store all the way from our house, can you believe it? She takes after her Aunt Umi.”

Enhanced senses are a common enough quirk that it’s unlikely to draw any attention and quite easy to fake considering Izumi does actually have them. (“All good lies have a grain of truth to them, ahuva”.) A too powerful child would draw attention they cannot afford, but a powerless child is just as damning in this age of petty beliefs and false demi-gods. So they lied.

And Izumi was used to lying about certain things. She didn’t always understand why her family kept so many secrets, but she kept them just as Nona told her to.

Only, this secret was different.

When Izumi babbled happily about heroes and daring rescues and saving all of Japan before , she’d been met with wide smiles and encouraging coos. Now she gets sad eyes and heartbeats that stutter when they agree with her.

“Oh,” they whisper behind their hands, “kids and their wild dreams. Hopefully she grows out of it before she breaks her own heart. Poor thing.”

And Izumi doesn’t understand. She is clever and smart and powerful but she’s still so young . She hears all these things people say about her and it makes her want to yell, to scream and cry and say that she’s more. She’s more than what they think she is, than what she’s pretending to be. 

But Izumi keeps her family’s secrets. And maybe, one day, they won’t weigh so heavy.

***

Perhaps if the townspeople were cruel and terrible their lack of belief would be easier to bear. But they’re not. They’re kind and empathetic and all the best bits of humanity that Izumi loves.

Izumi’s not sure how to feel about that.

***

She starts kindergarten with the ten other kids her age and finds she learns much faster than anybody else in her grade. Musutafu’s small-town school struggles to keep up with her hurricane mind.

They don’t let her skip kindergarten, because kindergarten’s more about socializing with others than it is about academics, but when she’s supposed to be starting first grade, they put her in a second grade classroom instead. A spinning dervish of thoughts and ideas and questions half everyone’s size.

The second graders all call her Imouto-san and Izumi grins as she swings her feet beneath her too-big desk. No one else can see it hidden beneath a glamour as it is, but Izumi’s tail wags fast enough to cause the wind to knock all of Hiro-san’s papers off his desk.

She apologizes, but it happens twice more before she’s able to still herself.

***

Time moves on, and Izumi grows, but she doesn’t change. Not really. Not in the ways that matter.

It’s after school one day, when Izumi is walking home that she passes by the park. Normally, she cuts through the forest to get home instead of taking the main roads. That way she can run as fast as she likes without anyone asking questions.

But today was sunny and she wanted to enjoy it a little more. And, perhaps, she wanted to visit the Odd Shop on Main. Mrs Lily is always so nice and gives her new American sweets for free if she tells a joke—even if they're bad.

She's skipping past the park gate when she notices it: harsh voices and the sound of someone being pushed over. Her ears swivel automatically and her head follows a second later. When the scene registers, Izumi is already jumping over the tall fence, uncaring of who may see her.

“Hey!” she yells, running full-tilt at the pair of third graders standing above Yashiro, one of her classmates. He’s a soft-spoken kind of boy. Shy, but always nice to her even though she’s small and cries a lot.

The two older kids—twins she thinks, though she doesn’t know their names—turn to look at her. Their matching, glimmering insect wings buzz behind them in shock at her sudden arrival as she plants herself in front of Yashiro.

She puts her hands on her hips and tries to make the same face Nana Naoki makes when they’re particularly cross. “It’s not nice to push people,” she says scoldingly. “You should apologize.”

The twins look hesitant now that she’s standing there. It doesn't matter that she’s half their size and weighs about thirty-eight pounds soaking wet. Everyone in town knows who she is. The green hair and eyes can only mean one thing after all and no one wants to anger the Midoriyas.

(There’s just something about them--the glint in their eyes, the air they carry, perhaps--that makes one very careful to not provoke them.)

When neither twin makes any move to either leave or do as she says, Izumi hums meaningfully, the air around her turning stifling.

The girl grumbles, and glares over Izumi’s shoulder. “He should’ve stayed out of our way,” is all she says before grabbing her brother and stalking out of the park.

Izumi’s mouth twists, because that was not an apology, but she decides against going after them.

Yashiro has pulled himself to his knees and is gathering the things that fell from his book bag. Izumi kneels to help.

“Are you okay?” she asks. She doesn’t smell any blood and his heartbeat sounds normal, but it’s probably polite to ask anyway.

Yashiro looks at her, cheeks pink and shoulders hunched to his ears. “Yes, I- Thank you, Midoriya.”

She grins, handing him his pencil bag, newly refilled with all his pencils. “Anytime!”

***

It becomes a Thing.

The whole, ‘Izumi stepping in between schoolyard squabbles’ Thing.

It gets to the point that the other kids, older and younger, begin to expect her to step in. Because of course Izumi will help. She always does.

(Sometimes, she can even hear kids using the threat of her name to ward off bullies rather than saying they’ll tell a teacher. It makes something warm bloom in her chest every time.)

The arguments are never anything serious, and cases of bullying like with Yashiro and the twins are few and far between. The townspeople are good and so are all the kids, but they’re all still children. They get rowdy or into stupid fights over toys or someone accidentally fires off their quirk.

It doesn't quite matter how or why a situation pops up, because, for no real discernible reason, Izumi always finds herself stepping in the middle of it to play mediator.

Which is okay. She wouldn’t do it if she minded or anything—and it’s not like she can really stop herself either. She just… moves when she hears voices raised, like some strange sort of pavlovian response.

It’s not a problem. In fact, it’s great because Izumi is helping people. Even if it’s only in small ways (which is okay for now, she’ll work her way up to bigger ones), it’s made the townspeople stop looking at her like she’s so small all the time.

And, well. It’s not the reason she’s been doing any of this but it feels… better. Nice.

***

Four months after it all becomes a Thing, Izumi gets into a fight.

Not on purpose, because she never seems to do these kinds of things on purpose, but she steps in the middle of an argument she probably shouldn’t have. It was bound to happen eventually.

The bigger boy, Daiki, has some impressive anger issues and a quirk that makes people around him just as angry as he is. She’s interrupted many altercations between him and some poor kid who accidentally set off his quirk. Normally, it takes only a few soothing words to calm them down.

Daiki is quick to anger but equally quick to calm, if you know how.

And now, it seems, her luck has run out. The moment her mouth opens, Daiki is already screaming at her and the anger is just there. It burns, acidic and hot at the base of her throat.

She swallows it and refuses to shout back. This is not the first time she’s been on the wrong end of his quirk, she knows how it works and she knows how to handle it.

That is, until he throws a punch at her.

Her head snaps to the side, cheek stinging with pain. She slowly turns back to Daiki, and for the first time in Izumi’s young life, she is furious. Her eyes burn with unfamiliar rage. The taste of copper and iron sit heavy on her tongue when she bares her teeth in a snarl and Daiki steps back, suddenly afraid.

Later, she’ll feel unbearably sorry and embarrassed enough to spend an entire day making cookies with her mom to give to Daiki as an apology. But right now?

Right now, Izumi looks over this boy who’s twice her size and she finds him lacking. She looks at him through the haze of red and hears the rabbit-quick beating of his heart over the whispers of magic swirling at her fingertips and she leaps.

***

She gets in trouble, obviously.

But everyone knows her and they know Daiki’s quirk. They aren’t really mad at her for fighting, but they are mad at her for biting and scratching Daiki enough to draw blood and send him to the nurse.

(She fought dirty. Fought the only way she knew how, with her teeth and claws and wicked sharp mind. All Daiki had was his fists and anger and size.

He never stood a chance.)

Izumi cries after the haze of Daiki’s quirk falls away. Babbles apology after apology through the hot burn and hiccups of her tears. She didn’t want that to happen, didn’t want to hurt anyone like that.

When her mom comes to pick her up from the principal's office, there’s a disapproving frown on her face. It doesn’t stop her from sweeping Izumi up into her arms, though.

She’s herded into Nona’s office the moment they’re home. The disappointment on Nona’s face makes her want to burrow into the ground and never come back up.

When Nona asks why she had gotten into a fight like that, Izumi has to explain it all. Daiki’s quirk and interrupting fights before they happen and stopping big kids from picking on little ones.

There’s a long moment after Izumi stops talking where Nona just stares at her, quiet and unmoving. Then: “A good fox,” her Nona reminds, “is a smart fox.”

She doesn’t continue, but Izumi knows what the rest is.

A smart fox avoids fights. A smart fox play hero. A smart fox, when they absolutely must, fights for themselves and what is theirs and nothing else.

Izumi, for all that she tries to be, is not a good fox.

She’s too loyal. Too stubborn. She cares too much and speaks too loud. She wants--needs--to be a Hero. It burns in her chest, growing hotter each time she watches all her favorite Heroes swoop in to save the day on the news.

One day she’ll be on that screen too. No matter how un-fox-like it is.

So when Nona stands, her tails fanned out behind her, and tells her that, under no circumstances, is she to involve herself in the conflicts of humans, Izumi only nods. She doesn’t argue or beg or barter. Asking will get her nowhere.

But foxes don’t ask for what they want, do they?

“Okay,” Izumi says, staring her Matriarch in the eye. Human problems are handled with human laws, and yōkai problems with yōkai laws. But there are exceptions. And Izumi is a good enough fox to take advantage of loopholes when she sees them.

There is a whole world of people who need help out there, and with one Promise, Izumi makes all of them hers. Innocents and victims, the scared and the helpless; hers to watch over, hers to protect. Her responsibility.

Her problem.

Izumi, only seven years old, stands before her Matriarch and Mother as shackles twine themselves around her wrists. Gleaming, unbreakable iron boiled into existence by the intensity of her vow.

(It isn’t easy to bind a fox.

Unless, of course, the fox allows themself to be bound.)

***

She’s eight when she meets a boy with fireflies in his palms and caramel in his skin.

He moves into the house next door, almost half a mile down the hill, and Izumi can hear him and his mother scream at each other for an hour before it suddenly stops, the sound of a door slamming echoing into the air.

The next day, the mom and boy show up on their porch. Midoriya Manor never gets visitors. 

Izumi answers the door.

***

Katsuki stares up at the looming, old house and glares.

He doesn’t want to be here in this stupid, nowhere town with a bunch of useless nobodies .

He wants to be back at his old school, where everyone told him how great he was and always did what he said. Here, in this stupid small town, there were barely even any kids to order around.

It made Katsuki angry.

But the Old Hag and his Pops didn’t seem to care. He yelled and cried and demanded to stay and they still just packed him up and moved out to this stupid house that’s supposedly been in his mom’s family for generations.

It looked old and smelled like mothballs.

Katsuki hated it.

He hated it and his stupid weirdo grandfather for dying and leaving it to them in his will and making it his last wish that they live in it. What did it matter to his grandfather? He was dead!

Katsuki is alive and almost nine years old and it’s the end of the world.

“Oh,” the Old Hag says in surprise when the door opens. “Hello there, cutie.”

Standing at the open door is, instead of some adult, a fluffy green-haired girl almost an entire head shorter than himself with dark skin and even darker freckles that were like, everywhere. She’s half-hidden behind the door and keeps looking between him and his mom rapidly.

Katsuki glares at her, baring his teeth in the hopes she’ll run away scared like all the other girls from his old school did.

Instead, she just blinks at him and beams, sunshine bright and delighted .

It doesn’t get better from there.

***

Izumi stares at the boy with fireflies in his palms and can’t help but think this. This is what she's been waiting for. This boy with power bursting from skin too small to hold it all and Fate clinging at his heels.

This boy who’s like me in all the ways no one else has ever been. 

The boy, Bakugou Katsuki, does not agree. In fact, he doesn’t seem to like Izumi at all.

Izumi tries not to take the yelling and insults personally. Katsuki is upset and sad and on unfamiliar land with people he doesn’t know. Izumi would be scared too.

When she says that to Katsuki, she only gets shoved to the ground by blisteringly hot palms.

“I’m not scared, idiot!” His heartbeat stutters in his chest. “Stay away from me!”

So Izumi does. For a little while, at least.

She gives him a week.

***

For all his screamed insults and crude personality, Izumi finds there’s much more hiding beneath the surface of one volatile Bakugou Katsuki.

Her first glimpse is when he walks into her fourth-grade classroom despite him being her age. Izumi grins at him when he enters, eyes bright as he takes the seat in front of her. He’s smart, apparently. Smart enough to skip a grade like her, or perhaps just hard-working enough to overcompensate.

Izumi watches him throughout class, sees the way he takes notes and asks questions, and learns that it’s both, actually.

***

He wants to be a Hero like her.

Wants to fight and win and beat back the darkness with his fists and teeth and sheer tenacity.

It’s different from what she thought a Hero should be. And different still from the kind of Hero she wants to be.

Battle versus rescue. An image of unyielding victory versus the quiet surety of hope Izumi wants to spread.

This new side of heroics fascinates her and she can’t help asking about it. She wants to know everything and asks question after question, barely pausing to breathe.

“Holy fuck,” he exclaims, causing Izumi’s eyes to go wide. “Do you ever shut up?”

She opens her mouth and closes it. Then, “No. Not really.”

His scowl is the kind that curdles milk and perhaps Izumi should be offended or scared or any type of normal reaction, but instead, she just grins and offers to share some of her sour gummies. He takes them all, snapping his teeth at her like he expects her to protest but she only laughs.

Katsuki is sharp and feral like the cats in the forest and Izumi thinks perhaps it’s just that he’s never been shown the right kind of kindness. She knows better than anyone how an environment shapes a person.

There’s a whisper in the air when Izumi looks at him, a voice just at the edge of her hearing. It tells her to pay attention. Pay attention to this half molded boy standing at the crossroads of destiny. Pay attention to him because he’s going to be important.

And, well. If that's true then Izumi is hardly going to let his bad mood chase her away.

***

Katsuki holds out for an entire month before Izumi’s constant giggling laughs and habit of following him around town wears him down. The other kids are stupid and don’t like how he yells. They don’t do as he says and that pisses him off so he yells more and the cycle starts all over again.

So, Katsuki decides that even practically useless, annoying Izumi is better than no friends at all.

***

“Why do you do that?” he asks her angrily one day, a few weeks into their friendship—not that Katsuki will call it that.

She’s climbing down from a tree, kitten held in her arms and she stares at him in confusion, head tilted to the side.

“Do what?”

“That!” he says as she happily passes the kitten to the preschooler he belonged to. She waves the toddler off with a grin while Katsuki fumes at her side. “You’re always sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, doing stupid things for everybody and running around town like a chicken with its damn head cut off. Why?”

She’s always running off. Always so busy because she’s agreed to help this person or do that thing. Doesn’t she ever just stop?

Izumi blinks, before thinking over the question carefully.

“Why do you want to be a Hero?”

Katsuki glares, mouth already opening to demand a real answer, not a stupid question to his question, but Izumi speaks over him. “No. Really think, Katsuki. You say you want to win and be the best, but you could do that in any job. If you like fighting, you could be an MMA fighter, or a bounty hunter, or even join the military. Become a colonel or something, the youngest ever. But you don’t want to do that. You wanna be a Pro Hero. Why?”

She- He doesn’t- That isn’t-

Katsuki glares at her when he can’t come up with an answer. Saying he wants to be better than All Might sounds childish, and… it’s not really what Izumi’s asking anyway. He’ll look stupid if that’s what he says.

But, he doesn’t know the answer to the question she asked either. He’s just… always known that’s what he’d do, from the very first moment he’d seen All Might, from the moment he learned what a Hero was . He never bothered with anything else, never bothered to question why.

Izumi just stares at him, her gaze digging into him with burning intensity like none of his secrets or thoughts are safe from her.

“The answer isn’t in your head or your fists, you know,” she says, looking away to pick up her bright yellow bag covered in Hero stickers and pins. When she turns back, her eyes are filled with a secretive light. She pokes his chest lightly. “It’s in there.”

***

Katsuki’s quiet for the next three days.

She worries that she messed up, that she may have pushed Katsuki too far too fast.

But then she sees him help one of their kōhai pick up their things after spilling their backpack out in front of him. And fixes a classmate’s bike when the chain gets messed up. And helps her carry Old Man Watanabe’s groceries that one time. 

He grumbles and shouts and glares the entire time he does them, but it wouldn’t be Katsuki if he wasn’t acting like he was angry. Besides, it's the kindness that matters, being nice about it is secondary.

***

It isn’t long before Katsuki becomes Kacchan and Izumi becomes Freckles or nerd or crybaby or a thousand other throw away, half-insulting nicknames.

Katsuki bears his nickname with as much elegance he can muster—which isn’t a lot—while Izumi always seems so delighted by hers. Even the insulting ones.

Katsuki never quite understands her obsession with nicknames, with being so very careful about introducing herself. The third time Izumi tries explaining the power of names without giving away magic and skulks and the world hidden in the stars that she’ll never get to share with her best friend—and the fourth time she cries over it—she gets a determined look in her eye.

The next moment, both her hands are on Katsuki’s chest, right above that soft place where your ribs begin to fall away, vulnerable and warm. The pressure she applies is firm and ungentle.

There is nothing gentle about what she plans to do next.

Katsuki doesn’t have a second name, not like Izumi does. He wears his soul on his sleeve and that terrifies Izumi so she’s going to fix it.

***

The thing about a name, is that it’s not just what someone calls you.

A name is a brand upon your soul. A name is the story that your entire being is dedicated to writing. A name is the culmination of everything that you were, that you are, that you will ever be.

It is the key that unlocks you, that most easily makes you vulnerable.

Izumi places her hand over that key, tenderly grabs that thing inside Katsuki that makes him all that he is, was, will ever be , and then she rips it from its lock. She takes her first true friend and reforges him into something else, something better, something he was always meant to be.

Katsuki screams for only a moment. And then…

The fireflies in his palms turn to stars.

***

Bakugou Katsuki has two names.

The first one was the one he was born with, the one he’s told everyone his entire life was his name.

The other is the one his strange, otherworldly best friend burns into him at the tender age of eight years old.

It’s an Olde Name. One that is painted across cave walls in human blood and tucked neatly behind the teeth of every battlefield corpse.

Anyone can understand what it means. Somewhere in the back of their minds where instinct and history live, they know this name. The translation, if one was willing to sacrifice for such knowledge, would be easy.

Warrior.

***

After, Izumi whispers her own name in his ear.

Her other name, the one she should never tell unless she’s absolutely sure she can trust them.

(Because it is an Olde name. Because she is the youngest Midoriya. Because there is too much power in her chest to be so careless with her name even if it’s her right to do with as she pleases.)

But Izumi knows she can trust Kacchan because he’s Kacchan. If she could’ve, she might’ve waited longer to tell him. Until her birthday maybe or after she convinced him to stop handing his name out to anyone who asks.

But things changed and she grew impatient. She knows his name— chose his name. It’s only fair he knows hers too.

Katsuki doesn’t quite know what it means to be given this gift, just like he doesn't quite know what it is Izumi did to him, but he promises to guard it all the same.

***

The pair are practically attached at the hip after that.

It’s something no one in town saw coming. In fact, they all half believed the two would end up killing each other—or, more likely, that Katsuki would eventually kill Izumi.

It’s practically a miracle. By all accounts, the two should have crumbled under the weight of their volatile differences. Two opposites that never should have mixed coming together and working in a way no one can quite explain.

Where Izumi—strange, selfless, little Izumi—prefers to use her mind and heart to solve the problems she’s always running at without a second thought, Katsuki uses his fists and sharp tongue as his opening move. A bleeding heart shoved in the center of a human explosion.

For every insult Katsuki sees fit to fling, Izumi is right behind him with an apology and kind words. Whenever Izumi is too caught up in her own mind, thoughts too loud and emotions too high and all the variables too much , Katsuki is there to snap her out of it with easy decisions and barked orders.

They ebb and flow around one another. An ever-present push and pull between the two that sparks up into stubborn drive and exuberant competition. For all their differences, there are some places where they're just too similar. But it’s those that allow them to function as a unit at all.

A yin and yang, balanced and opposing and complimentary all at once..

Izumi becomes the filter through which Katsuki can interact with the world. She understands him in a way few can, can read him and speaks his language and know when he’s just posturing to save face. And in turn, Katsuki becomes the flame and gasoline made to keep Izumi running, keep moving forward, keep reaching and growing and building .

The townspeople grow used to the two of them running around and causing havoc. Rarely a day goes by without hearing of some new antic the pair have roped themselves into.

But if asked, they can all agree. One day…

One day those kids will be extraordinary.

Chapter Text

Musutafu is a small town. Not suffocating or anything, but with only a few hundred natives, it’s not far off to say that everyone knows each other. Word travels fast. So when a man begins renting out the old cottage near the onsen, it’s not long before everyone is talking about it.

The rumor mill picks up despite--or perhaps because of--the way he seems to keep mostly to himself. For a while, he seems more like a ghost story than a man. Only showing up at the shops when they’re least likely to be busy. Haunting his cottage porch, glimpsed by the occasional onsen worker.

Then, out of nowhere, it’s as if he can’t bear to stay in his rented house for anything other than sleep.

It’s pretty boring gossip, all things considered, and yet Izumi finds her ears pricking at the mention of the man despite herself. 

***

Toshinori has always been restless. Always moving and fighting and becoming.

And here, hidden away in this sleepy town with no villains to fight or people to save, with a wound in his side that aches with every breath, he feels as if it’s clawing at his very skin. He’s here to recover, far away from the action in Tokyo or Hosu or any place where he's actually needed so he won’t be tempted.

The doctors recommended he take it easy for six months. Mirai— Nighteye, he should say now—told him to retire.

As if that was ever actually an option.

Toshinori agreed to stay out of Heroing for two months, and it's only that much because of the combined efforts of Torino and Recovery Girl and David. The trio were stubborn, and Toshinori never stood a chance when David pulled his trump card: Melissa’s puppy dog eyes.

He’s not even sure how David found out about the fight, what with him being on I-Island with Melissa. (Though Toshinori has a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with Nighteye.)

It’s nice that they care and worry, but Toshinori isn’t made for sitting still. He’s restless and the phantom cries of victims he’s not there to save ring in his ears like bells as he tries to relax.

Finally, he decides enough. If he sits still for even a single second more he’s going to tear out of his own skin.

***

He’s been in town for perhaps two and a half weeks (thirty-one days since he defeated him , twenty-eight since he’d woken up in a hospital bed, twenty-seven since he realized he’ll never be the same) and it’s not enough time for him to be walking around as much as he is but he can’t help it.

Toshinori keeps to himself for the most part. He waves and smiles and never forgets his manners, but he dodges any actual conversations with the locals. Keeping to the outskirts like he always does when playing at civilian.

Since the beginning of his career, he’s carefully kept Yagi Toshinori and All Might separate. Two different people as far as anyone outside a select few are aware. He’s gone years as unrecognizable from All Might and while he’s not quite worried someone will recognize him, old habits die hard.

Even now, when he looks like death warmed over, there’s always a chance. He doesn’t normally stress about it so much, but he’d rather hide the fact that the number one Hero is hiding away in a tiny farming village along the coast. And that means not drawing attention to himself.

He’s not quite as successful on that front as he’d hoped.

***

The first time Izumi sees him, he’s walking through the park.

She’s walking on her hands across the balance beam because she and Katsuki started taking gymnastics. (Katsuki wanted to take a martial arts class but was firmly denied by his parents until they could trust him not to attack another child with his newfound fighting skills, so Izumi got to choose their activity instead. Most highly ranked pro heroes have strong backgrounds in gymnastics, which mollified Katsuki some, and Aoi was one of the instructors which was another plus.)

The man is hurt. Badly. The heavy tang of blood hangs off him with such strength that even from all the way on the other side of the park she almost falls off the balance beam with the force of it.

But, what almost seems worse is that… underneath the smell of blood and pain and hurt, there’s only… him.

No lingering scent of others, of people who should care for him. Just the cinnamon earth of his own scent drenched in blood and the stale smell of strangers. Even humans, people who don’t purposefully scent their family and friends, smell like each other just by the nature of being close.

Izumi can’t imagine being that lonely. Can’t imagine living in solitude like that, with so many people around her and yet none who are close enough to touch and-

And, well. Izumi has a reputation for sticking her nose in places it doesn’t quite belong. She figures this is just more of the same if you think about it.

***

There are few people Midoriya Izumi has met that she didn’t like and fewer still who didn’t like her in turn. If asked, Izumi will say this is because she is very good at making friends.

If asked, Katsuki will say it’s because she’s a goddamn freak.

(If Katsuki was more articulate, he’d call her a black hole. She draws people to her. An inescapable orbit that leaves you irreversibly changed for knowing her. It’s just fact. The sky is blue. The grass is green.

There’s not a person dead or alive that can stand against Midoriya Izumi, unstoppable force.)

***

Toshinori has seen the girl running around town, normally with that loud boy at her side, but sometimes on her own. He’s heard about her more.

She’s the one who plays chess with the elderly at the park, and who climbs up trees for kittens, and who’s the first to look for runaway dogs. She reads to the younger kids at the library and helps out with the rice fields and onsen when they need extra hands.

He knows so much, Toshinori feels as if he’s already met the girl.

He continues to think that all the way up until he actually meets her and realizes he’s barely scratched the surface.

***

Izumi is good at patterns. Her mind is a bright chaotic whirl of thoughts and ideas and information at all times and it’s laughably easy to put it all together and find repetitions and relations.

Figuring out when the lonely man is going to be passing through the park again is no different.

He sits on that same park bench again, practically collapsing down onto it. His breath is short and his heart is pounding with the exertion of just walking . Izumi briefly wonders what happened to him. Then, she wonders why he’s pushing himself so much because that seems more pressing a matter.

She skips up to him and the smell of blood and pain is enough to make her dizzy but Izumi is determined, okay?

“Hello!” she greets brightly, hands clasped behind her back and smiling.

The lonely man startles. “Ah, hello?”

“Hello!” she repeats, “You can call me Midoriya Izuku. Do you like checkers?”

“Uh…” The lonely man blinks, clearly taken aback. “Yes? Do you-?”

She hops a bit in place, excited. “Great! Come play with me!” She reaches up to grab his hand and tugs him over to the stone tables set up for the games. The lonely man comes easily, probably because he’s surprised by the action.

He’s confused and a bit awkward at first which Izumi thinks means he doesn’t spend a lot of time around kids. Maybe he doesn’t know what to talk about. What do adults talk about? Her skulk normally talks about magic and whatever new creature has decided to snoop around their forest, so that's out. And he doesn’t smell like he’s a rice farmer.

So there goes most of her reference points for this kind of thing.

They’re four moves in and she can tell he’s trying to ‘let’ her win. Her ears flick in annoyance and she sets herself up for a move that will wipe him out in seven turns without taking any of his easy captures.

Maybe he likes Heroes? That’s what Izumi normally defaults to and it works most of the time. Who doesn’t like Heroes?

“Who’s your favorite Hero?” she asks, watching him move a checkers piece without even really thinking about it. He’s not even trying.

“Oh, uh,” he clears his throat. “I’m not really sure. I don’t… really keep up with them anymore.”

Izumi blinks and tilts her head. She doesn't miss the ‘anymore’ part.

“Come on. You had to have a favorite at some point,” she insists. “Someone you looked up to and admired! And you can’t say All Might because, obviously. I mean, he’s my favorite but there are a bunch of other Heroes! Like Ectoplasm! Or Gang Orca! Or! Or! There’s even all those American Heroes? Like the Hulk! Or there’s Spiderman. He’s new but he’s super friendly from what people have said! He even goes around helping people outside of villain attacks.  There’s a lot about him on the American forums despite him being so concentrated on a small area. I would-”

Izumi stops, realizes she’s been rambling about nothing again and blushes. “Sorry. I get excited.”

The lonely man is quiet for a second and then laughs. It’s quiet and huffing and sounds a little like it hurts but it also sounds happy and that makes Izumi happy. She giggles too even though she’s not quite sure what they’re laughing at.

“All right,” he gives, raising his hands in surrender. “You’ve convinced me. If I must choose, I’d say I have a… fondness for Titania. She’s a little before your time but-”

“Oh! Titania the Strong? Or the Fairy Queen?” she asks because sometimes Heroes have the same name.  People reuse them or pay homage to someone they liked or carry on a legacy. There’s been an active Dread Pirate Roberts in Europe ever since the second generation of Heroes.

She tries to think if there are any other Titanias. Ones who stopped Heroing before she was born. She can’t think of any, but back when quirks first popped up and people started calling themselves Heroes they weren’t all that good at documenting them.

They’ve only just started to get better at that.

The lonely man stares at her in surprise and oh. Right. He doesn’t know.

Most people in town do, but he’s new. He doesn’t know of her fascination with Heroes or how her memory is near eidetic. The knowledge bank in her mind is massive and a large part is dedicated to Heroes (to their quirks, to the power they wield, to the ways they use them because it’s always best to have plenty of tricks up your sleeves).

“…The Strong. Young Midoriya, how do you-?”

“I like Heroes,” she says before starting to rattle off what she knows about the Hero. “Titiana wasn’t very well known outside her prefecture but those in it were said to love her. She saved a lot of people and interacted with civilians regularly on patrol. Personable and kind. If she didn’t confine herself to such a small area it’s likely she would’ve become quite popular even without a flashy quirk.” Izumi pauses, “They say Titania had a great sense of humor, even in the face of danger.”

The lonely man is quiet for a long moment as he moves another of his pieces into a position that makes him easy pickings. Izumi ignores it as she takes her turn.

He clears his throat, then, “She did.”

Izumi snaps up to look at him so quickly her neck cracks. Her eyes are wide and amazed as she looks at the lonely man. “You met her? That’s so cool!”

His lips quirk at the corners. “I did. She was…” he clears his throat again and it’s then that Izumi notices he smells… sad. That’s not what she wanted! “She was one of the best women I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.”

“Oh.”

Izumi feels bad now. She didn’t mean to make him sad. And he sounds like, like he misses her. Izumi’s heart breaks, just a little bit and she hops down from her chair to stand in front of him.

Did he used to smell like her? Is she why he stopped getting close to people? Did he lose her?

Izumi’s mind spins and spins and spins . She doesn’t know. Too many variables. She needs more data.

But not now.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad,” she says. “When I feel sad, I get hugs and it makes me feel better. But some people don’t like hugs so Mom says I’m supposed to ask first. And, and you’re sad and I think you need a hug so do you want a hug?”

“I- I don’t-” the lonely man looks flustered now. Wrong-footed. Izumi tries to smile at him reassuringly.

“Mom says I give the best hugs!” she encourages. “So I’m sure you’ll feel better.”

After a long moment, the lonely man softens. “Well I- I suppose a hug wouldn’t hurt.”

“Great!”

She has to stop herself from launching at him, wary of how he’s still hurt and smells of blood. She’s not quite sure where it is but she’s very careful of where she puts her hands and is careful not to squeeze too tightly.

After a few seconds Izumi asks, “Do you feel better now?”

“Yes,” he answers, like he’s surprised by their truth. “Yes, I do. Thank you.”

She nods, satisfied. “Good.” Then, she turns and barely looks at the board before clicking her piece in a series of jumps that takes out half his side and leaves her at his home base. “Queen me, please!”

The lonely man blinks, opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again and laughs. Then, he does as she asked.

***

They play four more games after that with the lonely man actually trying after his sound beating in the first round. Izumi even lets him win the third one.

They talk about random things, Izumi driving most of the conversation by bouncing around random topics and babbling aimlessly. The lonely man doesn't seem to mind too much, and comments on things whenever she pauses long enough for him to get a word in edgewise.

By the time Izumi has to go home for dinner, the lonely man doesn’t smell as sad and Izumi finds she really likes him. He even ruffles her hair before she goes scampering off into the woods. He flattens one of her ears unintentionally but she can forgive that. He can’t see them after all.

He’s also familiar in a way. Almost like Katsuki was familiar, but just a bit different. She’s not quite sure what it is, but he’s nice and friendly and Izumi likes him.

“Did you have a good day, sweetie?” Mom asks her when she gets back home.

Izumi smiles up at her with all her teeth and says, “Yeah! I made a new friend!”

***

Her lonely man introduces himself the second time she finds him.

He calls himself Yagi Toshinori but his name tastes strange on her tongue. Not quite a lie, but not a truth either.

Yagi Toshinori may be his birth name, but it is no longer the name that holds power over him, at least not completely.

Izumi calls him Yagi-san and wonders what he called himself for so long that it changed his very being.

***

It’s somewhere around week two when Yagi-san first coughs up blood around her. He was laughing, a sound she takes such joy in creating, when he suddenly began coughing. A second later, the smell of fresh blood, thick and heady, filled that air and Izumi nearly had a conniption .

They’re in the park and her worried exclamations and mother henning draws the attention of most, if not every, parent in the vicinity.

They’re all rightfully worried and it takes a while before everyone’s calmed down enough for him to give some story about a swollen throat and how it’s already being taken care of.

He’s lying about it, Izumi knows, but he’s uncomfortable and concerningly red from embarrassment.

She lets him get away with it, just this once.

The parents give him wet wipes and napkins and well wishes that he gets better soon to his utter surprise. Like he hadn’t expected to be given kindness so freely. Izumi smiles as she waves them all away, thanking them for helping and thinking, not for the first time, how much she loves her town.

***

She goes home smelling like human blood that day.

It takes almost half an hour for Izumi to calm everybody down enough to explain what happened without worrying them more. And even after that, Aoi, Hina, and Riku, (her cousins who are all more than a decade older than her and starkly human thanks to the curse everyone will only mention in passing) crowd around her and fuss for hours. Aoi’s the worst of them, because she’s actually trying to annoy Izumi with her fussing. 

She manages it with resigned exasperation (and, okay, maybe a little bit of teeth snapping at Aoi) because they all did the same thing when she killed the kelpies causing havoc in the lake last month. (She isn’t sure what the big deal was then and she’s less sure now. Killing supernatural threats is basically her— the skulk’s— job.)

***

She spends six hours that night researching diagnoses where patients coughing up blood is a symptom, and as a result, completely ignores her homework.

She doesn’t like a single word she reads.

(Katsuki yells at her the next day about it but they're both weeks ahead of the rest of their class. He’s really only upset because he can’t compare their answers for the physics homework.)

***

It’s a badly kept secret in the skulk that Izumi will be the next Matriarch.

It doesn’t matter that she’s the youngest or that she’s not very fox-like at all, because that’s not how it works. Human royalty relies on lineage and familial ties, but they aren’t human. Wolf packs, their closest cousins among yōkai, rely on strength and power to pick their alphas. But the Midoriyas are sha’alim jinn and skulks are not packs.

A skulk’s head is chosen, not fought for. It’s about which individual the magic believes is best suited to leading and protecting the whole. And Izumi has been marked thrice over, by Magic and Fate and her own choices as she grows from girl to woman. Izumi has the will of a leader, the heart of a mother and the ability to inspire all she meets.

She will lead the skulk one day. Will watch over the forest and all of Japan.

She’s already Promised herself to it.

***

Days turn to weeks and Izumi keeps tracking Yagi-san down whenever she can. Sometimes they sit and just people watch and other times she demands he play games with her, something that makes him sit down and relax because while she doesn’t know specifics , it’s obvious he’s badly hurt.

All those books she’d scoured say the same thing: that he should be taking it easy. Something he is not doing himself so she does it for him.

He’s also been getting thinner since she met him. Cheeks growing gaunt and limbs becoming bony, like he’s losing muscle mass. Izumi, once she notices, starts bringing him snacks whenever she can. Random things at first that he turns down half the time to her disappointment and frustration.

It must show on her face one too many times because after a while, he sits her down on their bench and explains in fits and starts about his condition. 

Yagi-san was badly injured and lost his stomach. He can’t eat like he used to and isn’t really hungry anymore. His lungs are damaged, which is why he coughs up blood and can’t breathe right.

He tells her a laundry list of trauma and Izumi listens but can’t quite help the horrified look on her face; she’s still too young to have learned to school her expressions.

“That’s… that’s awful,” she whispers, eyes trained on the part of his abdomen he kept gesturing to, the place of such horrific pain.

“It’s okay,” he reassures her and her eyes flick up to meet his. He’s smiling, something warm and wide and so familiar but can’t quite place . “I’m a tough one, my girl. I’ll be alright.” 

Izumi presses her lips together and lets him change the subject. But while he speaks, her mind is a whirl of plans and ideas and things she needs to do.

***

Her mom ‘accidentally’ runs into Yagi-san at the market one day.

(Things like that are never accidental for a fox, never mind that her mom’s as human as Katsuki. She was born in a skulk and that makes her other in a way normal humans aren’t).

Yagi-san sees her first and his face lights up, “Little Izumi!” he greets.

She waves at him, head tilted back almost all the way as she grins up at him. “Hi Yagi-san!” she yells because he’s so tall. It must be hard to hear her, especially with his human ears. Those miss everything interesting.

His eyes turn onto her mom and he gets very red suddenly. Embarrassed and shy, like he was when she first met him. “Ah, apologies,” his hand rubs the back of his head, “You must be her mother.”

Mom smiles, but her eyes are studying him, flicking over his form, quick and analytical.

“I am, you may call me Midoriya Inko,” her mom bows in greeting. Yagi quickly dips forward to do the same. “You must be Yagi-san. It’s nice to finally meet the man behind the legend. Izumi talks about you a lot.”

Yagi-san looks delighted at that. “Does she?”

“Oh, yes. It feels like I already know you with how much she goes on,” she tells him then turns to Izumi. “And you’re right, sweetheart. He is too thin.”

“Right!” Izumi exclaims, causing Yagi-san to startle. “That’s why I needed all those bentos! He doesn’t like to eat on his own, so I have to make him.”

After he’d told her about his injuries, she’d very carefully read and researched what one should do after a gastrectomy like his and came away with a thousand and one rules for eating he most definitely was not following.

It made her more than a bit upset that he’s not taking care of himself like he should be. He acts so cavalier with his health and with no one else to worry over him, Izumi supposes the responsibility falls onto her.

Her mom nods gravely, very serious. “Of course. It’s important to stay healthy.”

“See!” Izumi spins on Yagi-san who looks frozen in mortification, “Even Mom agrees and she’s always right.”

His eyes flick between them both for a long moment before his shoulders slump and he grins, small and wry at them both. “Well if two Midoriya women are telling me that, how can I hope to argue?”

Izumi grins with all her teeth because she’s won and you can’t spend excessive time around Katsuki without picking up some habits.

Mom and Yagi-san talk for a while longer, mostly probing questions from her mom disguised as boring grown up stuff and small talk. Yagi-san answers them all correctly as far as Izumi can tell. He doesn’t lie once which is good because even if Mom can’t hear his heartbeat she knows how to tell when someone lies.

They leave that day with Mom’s stamp of approval and a skip in Izumi’s step.

***

Mom must have given some sort of signal because now Yagi-san can barely walk out of his house without being accosted by Midoriyas.

It must be really confusing on his end, all these random people coming up to him suddenly. Sometimes they don’t even look like Midoriyas because, according to Uncle Hikaru, “Knowing we’re related to you skews the results, sprout.” Whatever that means.

They all come away liking him though, some enough to continue interacting with him regularly. Which is good, because he needs more friends. Though Aunties Umi and Isami tease him so much she’s not sure he’ll ever stop being flustered.

(The best part though, in Izumi’s opinion, is that they all help her keep an eye on him. And, more often than not, they’ll place some sort of fruit or snack in his hands before running off and leaving him in confusion. Izumi laughs whenever she’s there for it to his utter confusion.)

***

Aoi plops down next to her on the couch one day, arm thrown over her shoulders and bright pink pixie cut hair tickling her cheek as she bumps her head into Izumi’s temple and hums lowly because it’s the closest her human vocal cords can get to purring.

Izumi’s classifying plant life for a biology project, something she normally doesn’t stop doing until it’s finished, but she looks away from it now because Aoi’s her favorite cousin. She’s never said so out loud because she'd rather die than hurt anyone's feelings, but everyone pretty much knows anyway.

“He’s weird,” Aoi says with no lead up or explanation. “Just like you.”

Izumi grins as Aoi ruffles her hair and takes that for the compliment it is.

***

Yagi-san touches her casually now. Ruffling her hair, guiding her with a hand on the shoulder, tugging lightly on her wild curls. It’s like he was waiting for permission or something.

It’s nothing she’s not familiar with. Her skulk does it all the time, both to scent mark and provide comfort, and Izumi spends most of her time invading Katsuki’s personal bubble for those same reasons.

Yagi doesn’t know about scent marking like she does because he’s human, wholly and cleanly even if Izumi can sometimes feel a nuclear reactor humming with all the energy hidden away in his chest. (And isn’t that just another reason he’s so strange? Izumi wonders what his quirk is sometimes, but never asks. She doesn't think she’d get the real answer if she did.)

He doesn’t know, and doesn’t seem like an overly touchy person but he touches her and it feels like when her mom pushes her bangs back and presses a kiss to her forehead. Affectionate and soft and Izumi can’t help leaning into every gesture like she’s starved for it.

***

The next day, Izumi greets him with a hug and he smiles that oh, so familiar smile and Izumi feels like she swallowed the sun.

***

The townspeople whisper, carefully outside of Izumi’s range of hearing for once, about the man she follows like a duckling and the growing bond everyone can see.

They were wary at first. They knew so little about this odd stranger.

But with Izumi running around him like a tiny, babbling dervish, unintentionally dragging him into every conversation she starts, it doesn’t take long for them to get a read on the man. It’s almost amusing how he had tried so hard to keep to himself only to fail the moment she crashed into his life.

A month and a half after he showed up, the townspeople can confidently say that Yagi Toshinori is good people. Earnest and kind in all the same ways Izumi is and uniquely awkward and well-meaning in others.

The townspeople whisper, and laugh, and can’t help but think how good it is that little Izumi found herself such a lovely role model.

***

He asks her, one day, why she spends so much time with him, seeks him out when she could be doing something more interesting than sitting at the park.

The look she gives him makes him feel like he’s asked a stupid question. The words that come out of her mouth immediately after make him breathless.

“Because I like you,” she says as if it’s just that simple. As if Toshinori hadn’t spent decades interacting with people who only liked him because he’s All Might. As if this little girl, hidden away in this idyllic town, saying she likes him as Toshinori, isn’t the most important thing he’s heard in years.

“Ah,” is all he says to that and Izumi goes back to eating her popsicle, only now she’s unashamedly leaning into his uninjured side.

Something warm in his chest blossoms and Toshinori can’t help wondering what exactly he’s gotten himself into now.

***

She brings Katsuki to meet Yagi-san not long after that. She’d been waiting for her skulk to stop harassing him so much, so it had taken longer than she wanted.

Katsuki was starting to think she’s purposefully keeping things from him—which she is, but not this. And the things she is keeping are mostly not her secrets to tell anyway. Not that it makes her feel any less bad for having them.

The two know of each other, of course. It’d be impossible for them not to with how much she babbles at them both about the other.

Katsuki is… unimpressed at first. Loud and disrespectful and really just himself in a bad mood because he’s not great at meeting new people. Yagi-san takes it all in stride even as her best friend swears enough to make a sailor blush. She can see Yagi-san wondering why Izumi picked him, of course, because everyone does after meeting Katsuki.

She watches from where she’s lying along the top of the monkey bars as they figuratively circle around each other, curious and trying not to show it. That is, until Katsuki grows bored with that and starts challenging Izumi to ridiculous contests.

She sighs but accepts every one because, while Katsuki is indeed the self-destructively competitive one, he doesn't hold a monopoly on that trait within their friendship.

Yagi-san gets roped into playing referee and rewards the winner with head ruffles and blinding smiles. Well, he tries to. Izumi accepts the affection just fine but when he reaches for Katsuki, her best friend snaps his teeth at him the moment contact is made.

Yagi-san pulls back immediately, eyes wide, but Katsuki hadn’t screamed at the top of his lungs or exploded something so Izumi knows it’s all mostly for show.

She'll have to explain that to Yagi-san later.

***

There’s a saying, in Izumi’s family. A saying that falls from the lips of every fox in the world. A silent oath one whispers from the day they’re born with magic in their veins.

Shual jinni, be thou for oneself.

There’s a duty every leader picks up when they are placed in power, but it is only foxes who truly carry its weight with them. A shimmering gem tied around their throat, great honor and deadly noose combined.

Matriarch, be thou for the skulk.

There’s no oath for a Hero to take. Nothing regulated or standardized besides the flimsy laws riddled with loopholes and flaws that Izumi could dance around with her eyes closed. So, she makes her own.

Hero, be thou for the people.

***

There is no new weight to her wrist, no new gemstone to tell of her Promise.

The shackles she wears like a badge of honor have already been there for years after all.

***

Two months come and go and Toshinori… stays.

Torino and David both called the day before he was meant to go back to Tokyo, to go back to being All Might, and they begged him to stay just a bit longer. Well, David begged. Torino yelled at him for ten minutes until Toshinori could get a word in edgewise.

After a long pause, Toshinori agrees, to all their surprise.

He wasn’t going to leave, even before they called to beg and he knows what the reason why is, even if he won’t admit it.

He’ll have to leave eventually. Sooner then he might like because he can’t just stop being All Might… but he can stay a little longer.

The world hasn’t fallen apart without him yet.

***

He does call into his agency, of course, and requests as much paperwork as possible be faxed to him.

He’s still restless and antsy and even if he’s not in the field there’s plenty of administrative work that needs to be done as All Might. He’s been ignoring it for too long.

Rika, his manager of all things relating to All Might’s image, is no doubt having a fit about his abrupt and continued absence, but he can trust her. She’s no doubt handling the media circus with an iron fist and cunning mind like always. 

She doesn’t let him touch his social media accounts or anything really relating to PR, but she does send him a list of vetted charities to choose from. He’s always like picking which ones to send donations to and make scheduled appearances at.

She also sends him a veritable mountain of things that need his signature, half of which are for merchandising and things like that.

He signs most of them without looking at what he’s signing.

He’s also faxed the backlog of Assistant Heroes—not ‘Sidekicks’, there were few words he disliked more than that old relic—applications that have piled up in his absence to sort through. Even with the rigorous standards themselves and what few Heroes All Might does have at his agency sorting through the applications before they ever arrive in front of him, there are still dozens that have piled up.

People who work with him have to uphold certain standards. That's something both him and Rika agree on. They can’t have some Hero with a lousy attitude associated with All Might. The press would have a field day with that kind of scandal and Toshinori can’t stand those types of people anyway.

The employees at his agency are held to a higher standard than others. It’s why it’s so prestigious in the first place. His Heroes have to be brave and kind and put the people first above all else.

They may not ever be pillars like him, but Toshinori will be damned if they aren’t beacons of good.

Toshinori is, was, and always will be, firm on this stance. 

He, of course, has to hide all the paperwork from Izumi—because that’s a thing she does now. Knock on his door to spend time at the cottage he’s renting. She does her homework at the kitchen counter while he keeps himself busy doing the less flashy sort of Hero work.

The problem is, she's a curious sort of child, and interested in most everything her eyes land on. She’s made a habit of poking her head over his shoulder while he’s sorting through sensitive documents, keen eyes dancing over the page, and scaring the shit out of Toshinori.

She stares at him with those all too knowing eyes as he scrambles to hide it from her. After the third time it happens she thankfully stops but there’s a contemplative look in her eyes that’s sure to give him stress headaches.

***

“What do you think he’s doing?”

Katsuki doesn’t look up from the math homework he’s checking for her. He also doesn’t ask who she’s talking about because there’s really only one person it could be. “Kicking ass, probably.”

“Kacchan,” she pouts from her place sprawled across his living room floor (they never hang out at her house, for all the obvious reasons). “Be serious.”

“I seriously think he’s kicking ass.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

Katsuki looks up to glare at her. “Why the fuck would I be? Izu, it’s All Might. He never loses. He’s fine, you goddamn bleeding heart.”

Izumi guesses he’s right. All Might’s never lost a fight. It’s what makes him so amazing. It’s just. There’s something at the base of her stomach that won’t let her let go of her worry. It’s been three months without a single sighting.

That’s… unheard of.

“Stop moping!” he yells, the sugar-burnt crackle and pop of his quirk jolting her from her melancholy.

“Careful, Kacchan!” she shrieks. “You’re going to burn the paper.”

Katsuki snaps his teeth at her but there’s no real heat in it. It’s playful, or as close to it as he gets. “I am not! And stop slacking and check my fucking history worksheet, you freeloader.”

She sighs and flips back onto her stomach. “Yes, Kacchan. Of course, Kacchan. Anything for you, Kacchan,” she gripes fondly.

“And don’t you fucking forget it.”

***

“Young Midoriya?”

“Huh?” Izumi startles from her thoughts for the third time this game. Realizing what she’s done, she blushes and hides behind her hand of cards. “Oh! Sorry, Yagi-san. I can’t seem to focus at all today.”

He smiles, warm and bright. “Not a problem, my dear.” He sets down his hand, choosing instead to give her his full attention. “Something on your mind?”

“Yeah. Just… I’m worried, I suppose.”

He hums encouragingly. “About?”

She blows out a heavy breath. “It’s been three months since anybody has seen All Might.” Yagi-san’s shoulders stiffen. Talking about All Might always makes him uncomfortable but she needs to get this off her chest and he’ll listen. “He’s never disappeared like this before.”

Yagi-san coughs into his fist. “Ah, well. Perhaps he is doing undercover work?”

Izumi gives him a look like she thinks he’s being particularly thick. “He almost never does undercover work. He’s not suited for it and there’s plenty of underground Heroes who can do a better job. He normally respects that.” She pauses, thinks that over. “And even the few times he was recorded to be associated with undercover jobs, there had been plenty of credible sources saying he’d been seen doing small acts of heroics. Community service, charity work, stopping muggings, things like that. But, right now, it’s radio silence! His social media is still active but that doesn’t mean much. All Might’s never just,” she waves her hands helplessly, “cut himself off from the public before.”

Yagi-san blinks at her and, when he doesn’t seem to have an answer to that, she keeps going.

“I just- I can’t stop thinking maybe he’s hurt? Or that something has happened to him? Kacchan says I‘m worrying over nothing but sometimes I just get these feelings, right? Like there’s someone out there who needs my help and… and this is one of those times.” She huffs a humorless laugh. “But again, Kacchan says I’m being dumb because why would All Might need my help? I’m ten! What can I do?

“But I just keep thinking how Sir Nighteye is still in Tokyo and hasn’t said anything official about All Might’s whereabouts and David Shield is still in America and there’s just nobody else that All Might has to lean on, at least not to public knowledge, and if those two people aren’t there for him then who is?”

By the end, Izumi has to take a deep breath because she hadn’t breathed once while she word-vomited all her worries at him.

When she looks up, Yagi-san is staring at her with an expression she can’t really read.

Quieter, she says—because she’s never been able to leave well enough alone and if Yagi-san doesn’t understand then who will?— “He saves everyone, but who’s there to save him?”

Yagi-san laughs.

Not a mean one, not like he’s laughing at her, but more like he was so surprised by her that he can’t contain the sound. Uncle Kazuki did that sometimes. Probably because Uncle Hikaru is more than a handful and he made the mistake of marrying him, or so he says.

“You truly are one of a kind, my girl. I’ve never, in all my years, met someone with a heart as big as yours.”

Izumi blushes to the tips of her hidden ears at such a high compliment and picks up her cards just to hide behind them. “I think we should finish our game.”

He gives a quiet chuckle but picks up his cards. “Okay, okay. But, for the record, my dear?” Izumi looks up at him and finds him smiling at her, small and soft. “I think there’s a lot you could do to help him.”

***

He watches Izumi and Young Bakugou run around each other, playing some strange amalgamation of tag and marco-polo where Izumi’s blind folded and only allowed to use her hearing and sense of smell to sniff out her friend.

It’s quirk training made into a game, something ingenious only she could come up with.

Izumi is doing well at locating Bakugou, head swiveling in whatever direction he’s in despite the blind fold, but she keeps tripping over and running into things, paying too much attention to her friend and not enough to her surroundings.

She does eventually catch him, pouncing on his back and sending both of them to the ground. Toshinori smiles despite himself as it immediately transitions into a wrestling match. Not for the first time since coming to this fantasy of a town, does Toshinori think wistfully of a world where things were different. If he didn’t need to hold up the world, if people were kinder, if the world was safer. If, if, if.

Toshinori wanted a family once, before he picked up all those mountains he should’ve climbed. He still wants a family—doesn’t think he’ll ever stop—but he’s practical enough to know it’s too late.

(He ignores the part of him that says it’s closer than he thinks. Ignores the way any thoughts of his future—the ones where he forgets he’s going to die in eight years at least—all have a child in them. A little girl with wild green hair and freckles and a heart big enough to cradle the world.

His mind ignores them, but his heart is soft and weak and tucks it all in his chest, safe and sound for those rainy days.)

***

Time skips along, as it’s wont to do.

Izumi dances into eleven years old with all the joy and brightness of a girl on top of the world.

Her magic grows more with each day and after the fourth time she comes home dragging some sort of creature behind her, the skulk starts whispering about having her begin training before the traditional sixteen years old.

She joins aikido at the suggestion of Yagi-san while Katsuki gleefully dives into kick-boxing after hounding his parents for three months. Izumi keeps up with gymnastics but Katsuki drops out to join the wrestling team.

It’s all vaguely concerning from an outsider’s point of view but it’s nice that he has an outlet.

For all that she’s growing up, Izumi is still much of the same. Still sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong and dedicating most of her time to helping other people, no matter how important the task, and staying at the top of her classes with Katsuki right next to her.

What little freetime she allows herself is divided between all the people she loves. She’s busy, but she’s always been busy. Always right at the thick of things when they happen which is just how she likes it.

It’s the best three months of her life, a bright summer she enjoyed to the fullest. Her magic has been practically singing in her veins because, until she becomes a Hero, until she takes her rightful place at the top, as a Protector , this is as close to perfect as she’ll get.

That, of course, means it can’t last.

Because perfect things never do.

***

Yagi-san leaves, because he has too.

She’d known that for a while now. His job is important, even if she’s not quite sure what it is he does.

He always dances around the question when she asks. Saying he works in relation to an important agency that helps keep people safe. He’s always adamant of how much he loves it and she can see the wistfulness in his eyes sometimes. Like there’s places he wants to be other than here.

And so, Izumi resigns herself to watching him leave her. Braces herself to lose this growing, fragile thing in her chest she can’t put a name to.

He leaves the week after her birthday and she’s there at his house to say goodbye. She expects this to be the last time she sees him, she expects him to leave and not come back just like the father she never met and doesn’t want to.

What she doesn’t expect is for him to press a phone into her hand, a single number already programmed into it, and tell her he’ll keep in touch. She doesn’t expect him to get on his knees so she can look him in the eye as he Promises to visit, to come back , whenever he can.

She tries hard not to cry, because her lonely man gets so flustered when she does, but she can’t help it. She sobs and throws her arms around his shoulders, clinging to him because even with the Promise she knows it will be too long before she sees him again.

She has so many things she wants to tell him. So many things to say and do and none of the time.

His lips press against her forehead. “I’ll miss you, my dear girl.”

But, perhaps she’ll still get the chance. Just… later.

“I’ll miss you, too.”

***

Katsuki, Aoi, and her mom all gang up on her the following days, trying their hardest to cheer her up and get her mind off things.

Her mom makes her favorite foods and Aoi teaches her magic tricks she’s not supposed to learn until Nona officially begins her training and Katsuki only grumbles a little when she takes to clinging to him like a heartsick koala.

It’s the last one more than anything that makes her realize how worried they must be.

Katsuki may not actually care about how much she’s in his bubble, but he does like to complain about it, loudly and vocally. He’s really very mean and if Izumi couldn’t always tell when he’s lying she’s sure she’d never have made it to being his best friend because she’d be crying too much.

But she’s worrying everyone and it’s not like she can’t text or call Yagi-san. He gave her the phone for a reason (though a whole new phone seems a bit much).

Izumi tries not to be so sad.

It only works a little.

***

Two days after Yagi-san leaves town, All Might saves thirty people from a hostage situation, rescues two potential kidnapping victims and stops three robberies all before two in the afternoon.

Izumi sees the news articles almost immediately because even if she’s sad and breaks into tears every couple hours, she’s been keeping her ear to the ground about any sign of All Might for weeks now. There’s pictures and videos and stories of his escapades everywhere and all anyone is talking about is where he’s been.

Izumi finds a video of him, barely thirty seconds long, of him apologizing for his absence. Some official story that’s nothing but lies falling from his tongue because it had taken Izumi all of five seconds of hearing his voice before everything clicked.

Izumi is smart and clever and sees things no one else does and she can’t believe she’d been so blind.

All Might’s face smiles at her through the screen but Izumi can’t hear what he’s saying because all she can see are bright blue eyes. Bright, familiar eyes and a familiar smile and familiar laugh and and and-

And her lonely man is the number one Hero.

She closes her laptop and screams.

Chapter Text

Her first thought—after screaming, of course—is that she needs to go tell Katsuki right now. She just found out something big and insane and Katsuki would want to know too.

She curbs that desire before it can go anywhere.

This is huge , yes, and she doesn't want to keep this from Katsuki but it’s also not her secret to tell. All Might- Yagi hadn’t wanted her to know. Otherwise, he would have told her.

But he didn’t. She figured it out accidentally instead.

Ugh.

How is one supposed to deal with figuring out their idol’s secret identity? How is someone supposed to deal with having known their idol for months without actually knowing and she just… Izumi has so many emotions about this.

All his nervousness whenever she brought up All Might makes so much sense now and, oh kami. She’s gushed about him to his face. Just have Katsuki explodo-kill her now. It’ll be a mercy.

How is she supposed to face Yagi now? What is she going to tell him?

She keens, low and long and distressed, into the silence of her room. It probably says a lot about her general existence that it’s that and not the scream that brings Aoi crashing through her door with a worried expression.

***

The next three days pass in a daze for Izumi.

It’s only by the grace of everyone thinking she’s just upset over Yagi-san that she gets through it. Which, she means, they aren’t technically wrong. But not for the reasons they think.

She misses him like an ache in her chest but it’s her mind that’s the problem.

Aligning the image of the Great Savior All Might , their Symbol of Peace and model by which all great Heroes strive to follow, with her dorky, awkward Yagi who spends his free time telling corny jokes is just… disorienting. It makes both too much and absolutely zero sense.

How can one person be so different and yet so similar at the same time?

She can tell she’s starting to get on Katsuki’s nerves with all her fidgeting and incoherent muttering. He’s taken to knocking her on the head when she spirals too far or when he needs her attention. Sometimes, she can even catch him frowning at her out of the corner of her eye.

It’s the same look he uses when unraveling complicated chemical equations.

She wishes she could just tell him, could share her worries and fears and concerns but she can’t. Instead, she smiles and begs him to take her to the bakery on main street until he gets irritated enough to stop trying to figure out why she’s upset.

***

Izumi opens the door right as Katsuki raises his fist to pound on the wood with all the aggression to be found in his boyish body. His fist halts mid-air, almost punching her in the eye.

He scowls at her. “I hate when you do that.”

She grins at the stutter in his heartbeat they both know she can hear. They both know he thinks it’s cool though he’s never said it.

“Did you need something, Kacchan?” she asks instead of pointing that out. He only gets grumpier when she acknowledges those kinds of things.

“What kind of stupid question is that? We’re going to the park, idiot. Or did you forget?”

Izumi thinks back over the last couple days. Katsuki never asked her to go to the park.

She decides not to point that out either.

“Let me grab my notebook.”

“Whatever. Just hurry the fuck up!”

“Language!” someone calls from inside the house. Katsuki automatically flips them off despite not being able to see them or vice versa. She finishes pulling on her shoes and pushes him off down the street before he can get into another screaming match with Uncle Kyo.

“We’re going to the park!”

“Have fun, sweetheart!” her mom says from the upstairs along with a chorus of other well wishes from everyone else.

***

Izumi will be the first to admit she has a bit of a skewed metric for what most people consider ‘normal.’ Katsuki’s not that far behind her, she thinks, but Kami forbid she tell him that.

Exhibit A: most kids come to the park to play in the jungle gym or build sandcastles. Izumi and Katsuki… do not do that.

“Kacchan, you’re putting too much strain on your joints!” Izumi calls from where she’s perched along the bar on top of the swingsets, balanced in a way one can only achieve with a tail for counterweight. “Try bending your elbow more!”

“Don’t tell me what to do, damn nerd!” he shouts, vaulting over the balance beam. “I don’t need your fucking help!”

His heartbeat doesn’t stutter—both because it’s going too fast for it to and what he said isn’t really a lie anyway. His arms still loosen up, because he knows she’s right and her advice has never been about him needing it.

The new angle should lessen the stress on his elbows but it’s going to make him sore quicker. Izumi makes a note about looking up exercises to help strengthen the muscles in his arms and shoulders in the corner of the page.

For the last month or so, Katsuki’s been all but brimming with excess energy. He’s barely able to sit still in the classroom anymore and seems angrier than ever. He’s even been suspended from the wrestling team for one too many displays of aggression. He still does kickboxing every other day but it’s not quite cutting it.

Izumi’s taken to pulling him out to the track at lunchtime to let him run out whatever energy he can. The first few hours after school and weekend mornings have become dominated by Katsuki dragging her into the forest to jog up the hiking trails or to the park for her to set up increasingly difficult obstacle courses for him.

Like today.

He’ll keep going until he’s dead on his feet, she knows, refusing to stop until he hits a wall of exhaustion and she has to half-drag, half-carry him back home.

It’s really starting to worry her, watching him work himself into the ground for no discernable reason. But he won’t talk to her about it.

She’s not sure if he’s embarrassed or prideful or some other self-important reason he’s come up with, but it all comes out to the same thing: Izumi floundering around to help treat the symptoms of a sickness Katsuki won’t talk about.

She can’t even yell at him about keeping secrets from her because all that would do is piss him off and make her a hypocrite. They both know Izumi keeps things from him, has secrets she can’t and won’t share with him (secrets that burn at the base of her throat, that keep building in number despite her best efforts).

One day they’re going to fight about that. It’s all she can do to push it off until tomorrow.

***

Her and Yagi talk near every day. Even if it’s only a few texts with hours between responses.

It had taken him two days in the beginning to call her. Days she now knows were probably busily filled with whatever All Might business he’d been pushing off to be here, but at the time she thought he’d been avoiding her. She’d been scared to reach out, hesitant to make the leap as doubts filled her mind.

But after, it was as if the floodgates opened. Calls and texts and video chats were exchanged as often as possible, the pair reaching out with the same vigor they had when they were right next to one another. 

He’s slow to answer texts sometimes, and video chats are often hastily rescheduled with little notice but Izumi understands. He’s busy. He’s All Might, after all . She can’t fault him for saving people.

Not, of course, that Izumi ever actually brings up the fact that she knows that. 

It’s not like she’s trying to hide it, but it just… never seems like the right time. It’s not a conversation to have on the phone, she thinks. 

And it’s not like she’s going to tell anyone, so it’s probably fine, right? She’s just waiting until she sees him in person again, until his next visit. It’s a delicate situation that requires a certain level of finesse that you can’t get over the phone, is all.

Not because Izumi is terrified that she’d accidentally betrayed his trust too much to come back from and he’ll never speak to her again if he finds out so she’s trying to prolong her time with him for as long as possible.

Certainly not that.

***

Izumi gets good at reading between the lines during her time talking with Yagi.

She’d already been good, in an unpolished fox-born-affinity kind of way. But having to parse through Yagi’s heavily edited daily schedules makes her better. He’s good at lying without lying. Dancing around issues and straight-up avoiding others. She can see how he’s kept his identity a secret for so long.

It means Izumi has to be sneaky about her questioning. Has to do more than just not be obviously worried after she’d watched some two-bit villain throw him through a wall and oh kami, what about his side? Why isn’t he in the hospital?

She watches All Might fights with something rapidly approaching anxiety these days. Flinches at hits more than she cheers for his wins.

Katsuki notices because he’s far more observant than people give him credit for.

He’s agitated by it as far as she can tell. Takes an almost personal offense to her worry over the number one hero, which is more than a little confusing for her.

Sure, he’s still a bit touchy about the whole ‘letting people help and worry about him’ thing but Izumi’s never seen him apply that hang-up to another person. Much less All Might.

Every time she wrings her hands at a TV screen or bites her lip while reading an article, Katsuki’s face twists like he swallowed a lemon. She wants to ask about it but is half-convinced it might be related to that other issue he won’t talk to her about, so she doesn’t. For now, at least.

Her temporary solution of waiting until Katsuki calms down just enough that she can tackle-hug him without being immediately thrown off is working well enough anyway.

***

Izumi remembers the first time she told Katsuki she wanted to be a hero, back when he was still all sharp edges and blistering palms. When it seemed like he’d never settle into his skin or breathe without the weight of all the expectations he’d placed on himself.

Before, even, the time she crawled back down a tree to meet the angry words of “Why do you do that?”

He’d told her he was going to be a better hero than All Might and Izumi had brightened like he’d hung the stars. Her mouth was halfway around a rambling tirade about saving the day and helping people when he’d laughed. Harsh and cruel.

It stopped Izumi in her tracks.

“How are you gonna be a hero?” he taunts, nose raised in superiority. “All you can do is hear and smell stuff from far away! How are you supposed to fight anyone with a quirk like that?”

This isn’t the first time someone has said this to Izumi, and she doubts it will be the last. That’s the nature of the secret she keeps. Forced to act smaller than she truly is.

There is indignation in her chest. It is not new.

The anger though? That’s new. She’s never been truly angry at the townspeople before.

The townspeople are kind and friendly and hers in the detached way she made the helpless hers, but Katsuki is different—is supposed to be different.

Her mouth twists into a frown. “Quirks aren’t everything.”

And they aren’t. She knows that, even before she sent Daiki to the nurse’s office in third grade. Izumi has her teeth and her claws, has her mind and a viciousness born of the chaos at her center. She has magic.

And past that? Her Nona remembers the years following the first quirks and the riots, the hatred . And her Nona before her had seen the time before quirks.

Izumi was raised on stories of magic, but also of the great feats humanity made with nothing but their hands and minds. It’s not quirks that make humans special. It never was.

Katsuki, arrogant and prideful and still so young , doesn't agree. Doesn’t understand.

“They hell they’re not!” he laughs and it’s a mocking sort of sound that makes tears prick at her eyes. “You only say that because yours is weak.”

“No!” she shouts. Her voice cracks and her breath heaves from her lungs like she can’t get enough air but she shouts anyway. “I’m not weak. I’m not less than you! You’re just being a bully and mean and that’s not how a hero acts!”

Katsuki pushes her to the ground and she’s sobbing now because the wind whispers to her and she knows, she knows, deep in her chest, that this is important. That there’s a crossroads here and it will change everything if she picks wrong.

“All Might wins and smiles and is kind and you’ll never be like him if you act like a bully!” she yells through her tears. Glares at him from her spot on the ground, through her tears and pain and hope and she thinks no. Not this time. Not him. Not here.

Izumi plants her hands on the ground, her knees dirty and face red, and she stands back up as tall as she can, chin tilted in defiance. She’s a whole head shorter than him and looks a sorry sight with all her tears but she stands before her friend, the boy that Fate decreed would walk at her side until the very end, and she glares.

Greek fire against boiling pools of blood and she doesn’t bother to flinch. She will bend and bend until she breaks for so many things but not for this. For this she will be stone or she will shatter.

“You’re not supposed to be mean,” she says firmly, honestly. “If you keep looking down on everyone, you’re only going to be sad and angry and alone. If you can’t see that, you’re not gonna get better and you won’t grow.”

He looks like she slapped him. Stricken and utterly still and furious but she doesn't care.

She’s not weak. Power is an old friend of hers and the world will shake beneath her feet. Izumi will grow up and she will be mighty.

Not even her precious Kacchan can tell her she won’t.

***

It was that moment, she thinks, that truly changed his path. Her inability to let him ruin himself for the sake of his pride.

If she was kinder, less selfish perhaps, she might have let him grow into it himself. Let him make mistakes and learn from them and lean on someone besides her for those life lessons.

But she is not and she didn’t. Instead, she shoved him into lessons he was not meant to learn yet for years to come. Instead, she robbed him of his growth and cheapened it because she couldn’t live with him hating her. Because she couldn’t bear to live in a world where he thought her small.

She only hopes that when he realizes what she did, he doesn’t hate her for it.

***

Katsuki knows there’s something strange about his best friend. He’d have to be blind, deaf and fucking moronic to not have noticed.

But, well. Weird shit happens all the time in this town. People do weird shit all the time in this town.

Spirit traps hang from every eve. The crows are smarter here than anywhere else. No one walks through the crossroads at the center of town. Everyone carries omamori in their pockets and places bowls of salt at their doors. People go missing for days only to show back up just fine and with little fuss. 

Something’s weird with his best friend, but then, he thinks, something’s weird with everyone.

He gets used to what he can and pointedly ignores the rest. It’s whatever. It’s not like it really affects him .

Until it does.

***

Katsuki starts seeing things from the corners of his eyes.

Shadows that move and pockets of air that shimmer like hot asphalt. Things that aren’t really there and faces that terrify him even when he can’t remember why. Voices just at the edge of his hearing and feelings he can’t explain.

 A bunch of weird things that don’t mean anything and definitely don’t make him jumpy or paranoid.

So what if he starts keeping a dreamcatcher above his bed or good luck charms in his pockets? Or if he starts flicking his bedroom light on and off three times before actually turning it off at night?

That no one’s business but his own. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t really know why he does it. He doesn't need to explain himself to anyone.

It’s nothing. At least, until he has to stop looking at Izumi head-on because when he does, he gets so dizzy he wants to vomit.

***

There’s a door in his house that wasn’t there that morning.

It’s in one of the basement hallways, tucked away in a corner and when Katsuki stares at it, it gives him the same ‘headache behind the eyes’ feeling as looking at all the broccoli-tops running around town.

A normal person would be unnerved and confused by all the fuckery going on. This has horror movie written all over it, with Katsuki starring front and center to get demonically possessed.

Katsuki glares at the door before barging his way through it without fanfare.

Being unnerved is for losers who never get shit done and any two-bit demon that thinks they can control him will be in for one hell of a surprise. Namely, his fist up whatever the equivalent of their ass is.

***

The door opens up into a stairway that leads to a secret second basement containing a library filled with books and the weirdest shit Katsuki has ever seen in his life.

He plucks a book from the shelf at random, opens to a page in the middle and skims over the overly fancy handwriting.

His blood freezes at what he reads.

***

“I think Kacchan’s avoiding me.”

Yagi blinks at her through the screen. “Hello to you too, my dear.”

“Sorry, yes. Hi, Yagi! I miss you lots,” she babbles quickly before going back to the problem at hand. “Kacchan’s avoiding me and I don’t know why.”

Yagi hums thoughtfully even as his mouth twitches with amusement. “Are you sure that’s what he’s doing? Hiding doesn't sound like the Young Bakugou.”

“It’s not hiding,” she defends on instinct, then bites the end of her thumb. “But I don’t know what else it would be. He’s acting… acting a lot like he did when we were first friends. Where he only interacted with me when he had to.”

“Now that definitely doesn’t sound like Young Bakugou,” Yagi half-heartedly teases, starting to look worried on behalf of Izumi. “Have you, perhaps, spoken to him about it?”

Izumi gives him a look like he’s just told her he thinks the sky is orange.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“You don’t just spring emotional conversations on Kacchan, Yagi,” she says, looking almost scandalized. “He’ll get hives or something.”

Yagi, for his part, only covers his mouth with his hand instead of slamming his face into the desk or bursting into laughter at her misery. That’s what Aoi did when Izumi asked her for advice, the unhelpful jerk.

“If that’s so, then I’m sure you just need to give him time. He’ll come to you when he’s ready.”

It’s not the advice Izumi wanted to hear because she’d already figured that out and she’s far from a patient person. But, she also knows he’s right.

“Yeah, maybe,” she sighs unhappily. Then, she plants her elbows on the table. “So how’s work going? Are your coworkers teasing you again?”

Yagi pulls a face like he’s trying to be long-suffering but it hits too close to amused and fond. “They always are, my girl. Always.”

***

If she didn’t know any better, she’d think Katsuki was just waiting for her to get anxious enough to blab to Yagi before he put her out of her misery. It’s a reliable way to gauge how big of a problem she thinks something is, seeing as she doesn’t like adding more things to Yagi’s already overflowing plate.

It was almost anti-climactic considering all the horrible things Izumi had been imagining. But, in her defense, it was her and Katsuki . Neither of them ever did anything by halves.

He corners her after school and pulls her down one of the hallways no one goes down. She’s so relieved that he’s actually looking at her and not pretending she doesn’t exist that she doesn’t even care when he crams her between him and the corner where the end of the lockers meet the wall, effectively boxing her in.

Her mouth is already halfway around a question, ready to start speaking at a thousand miles an hour without giving him a chance, but he beats her to it.

“I know.”

Her mouth snaps shut in her confusion. Her head tilts. “Know what?”

His eyes are boring into hers, the first time he’s looked her in the eye in… she doesn't even know. A month? It was before he started avoiding her entirely at least.

She watches as slowly, purposefully, his eyes flick to the top of her head.

She’s still confused. Is there something wrong with her hair? Her ears flick in impatience, waiting for him to just tell her-  

His eyes follow the movement.

Her ears stand straight up, panic coursing through her and his eyes follow that too. He can see.

He can see.

“You’re a fox,” he says and it’s not a question. “ Shual jinni, right?”

Behind her eyes, her mind spins and whirls like a hurricane. Moving so much faster than everyone around her, a mess of plans and paths and actions laid before her like a prophecy of her own choosing.

She stares into his eyes, into glittering pools of blood, and sees the nervousness hidden there behind the arrogance and bluster. She sees the wariness and the confusion. But no fear. No hatred.

Izumi takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and makes a decision.

“We need to talk to Nona.”

***

Everyone’s surprisingly calm about Katsuki being in the know.

Most of the adults give her an almost disappointedly exasperated look before she explains he has the Sight which is what gave them away. Which… rude. Sure, she’s been wanting to tell Katsuki for years but that doesn’t mean she would. Not when Nona gave a direct order.

She can get away with a lot but not even she would test such a boundary. Though, by the looks she’s almost sure she could’ve. Interesting. A thought for later.

They almost get through it all without a major incident.

That is, until Katsuki opens his mouth and drops a bigger bomb than him being the first person in a hundred years to figure them out.

“There’s something else you should know.” He’s shuffling his feet next to her and if Izumi didn’t know any better she’d think he’s worried. But about what?

Her Nona raises her brow at him. “And that is?”

“My Mom’s maiden name was Takanashi.”

Oh.

Oh.

Yeah. That’ll do it.

***

They try to make her leave the room.

Izumi snorts and latches onto Katsuki's arm, staunchly refusing to let go. You don’t spend almost four years as Bakugou Katsuki’s best friend without picking up at least a few of his brattier habits. Such as his problem with doing things he doesn’t want to.

 Izumi knows what hunters are, knows to be wary of them the same way all yōkai are. She knows who the Takanashi Clan are too, knows they’re the reason her skulk is hidden away on their own land even if no one will tell her why or what they did.

Learning that Katsuki, her best friend, is a Takanashi? A descendant of the same people who cursed her skulk? Her born enemy?

Well. 

Izumi’s not quite as upset as she supposes she should be.

It’s just that, it’s still Katsuki isn’t it? The same boy they’ve all know for years? Nothing’s really changed . He can’t help the family he was born into and it’s not like he’s ever threatened them or was even likely to do so.

She doesn’t understand why everyone’s throwing a fit.

After a long five minutes of people yelling and being unnecessarily dramatic— distantly, Izumi wonders if this is how her classmates feel around her and Katsuki—she decides enough is enough.

She shares a look with Aoi, one of the few people not making a big deal out of this, along with her mother and Gramps. Aoi understands what she needs without speaking.

A sharp whistle pierces the air. Loud and shrill enough to make even the humans wince in pain. It’s quiet almost immediately, and Izumi grins even as the adults glare at them.

This is why Aoi is her favorite.

“Thank you,” she smiles, then turns back to Katsuki, patting his forearm. “You can keep talking now.”

***

Everyone’s staring at him.

Adults who are older than they look and far more powerful all have their attention on him.

Nona—Midoriya Asuka, the Matriarch— is standing before him, perfectly poised with all her tails fanned out behind her. She doesn’t look older than forty even though he knows she has to be more than a hundred. Her silver eyes bore into him and he’s almost positive she’s exactly what Izumi will look like in however many years. Powerful aura and all.

He can taste ozone in the air and knows that it won’t matter that he’s known most of these people for years. It won’t matter that he and Izumi are practically inseparable or that Inko is as much his mom as she is Izumi’s and vice versa with his own parents.

One wrong move and he doesn’t think he’ll leave this room.

He can’t even say he’d blame them. He doesn’t know exactly what his family did to them, but he knows it wasn’t good. Knows it forced them into hiding. These great, powerful beings who should be neatly sat at the top of the yōkai food chain, just under dragons and Nephilim.

So, Katsuki does what he always does when faced with a challenge. Raises his chin and charges forward. Failure isn’t an option and Katsuki sneers at the very idea.

He needs them to trust him which means he needs to prove he can be trusted.

There’s a reason he spent so long holed up in that damned library, paging through books that made him queasy to look at. He had to get this right.

He locks eyes with the Midoriya Matriarch and speaks , clear and with as much authority as he, a boy still a few months from thirteen years, can muster.

“I, Bakugou Katsuki, renounce my ties to the Takanashi Clan by witness of the earth, moon and stars. The grudges of my ancestors are not mine and no secrets held by the Midoriya Skulk will pass my lips.” His hands flex at his sides and he takes a deep breath. “I walk this path with you, not against you. I swear it.”

He can feel the metal and magic curling its way around his wrist, so similar to the ones he now knows are on Izumi's. He doesn’t look at it, too busy holding the Matriarch’s gaze and awaiting her judgment.

It’s tense for a few long seconds and the smell of ozone grows almost overwhelming. He doesn’t dare to even breathe.

And then… she blinks. Her eyes are a warm green rather than gunmetal silver and something like approval rests there.

“Very well. Your oath is accepted, young Seer. I, and that of my skulk, hold no ill will toward you.”

His breath wooshes out of him and he thinks he hears laughter at the edges of the room.

Nona—because that’s who she is again, not the Matriarch—turns her head towards Izumi behind him. “You’ve chosen a good one.”

Izumi latches onto his arm and Auntie Inko comes up on his other side to thread her fingers through his hair.

“I know,” she says proudly.

***

It falls to Izumi to explain everything, even though it probably shouldn’t have.

Katsuki, unsurprisingly, came in with a good chunk of knowledge. For all that he’s an easily lit fuse, he’s not one to disregard an advantage. And for this situation? Knowledge was the only one he had.

Izumi kindly but firmly corrects any of the stereotypes or misconceptions his source material gave him, which was surprisingly few. The Takanashi’s bestiary was unexpectedly unbiased, it seemed.

Katsuki still looks a bit shaken from having his entire worldview turned upside down and exhausted by all the things he’s learned, so they call Mitsuki and Masaru and tell him he’s going to stay the night. It’s a bit odd, because Katsuki has never set foot in her house before, much less spent the night, but the magic settled around them means that the Bakugous don’t question it. Izumi’s spent more than enough nights at their house, so it’s far from their first sleepover, but it’s definitely not normal.

Not that they’re going to point that out.

Her and Katsuki build a pillow fort in the middle of her room. Katsuki starfishes out, taking up as much space as possible while Izumi curls tightly into a ball and tucks herself up against the crook of his flung out arm.

“I was pissed, you know,” he says into the darkness, apropos of nothing. It’s still dark outside and they’d be getting up for breakfast soon if they had ever gone to bed in the first place. “Absolutely furious that you kept something this big from me. I thought you- I figured that you were so damn powerful and that you’ve just spent the last four years laughing at me.”

Izumi jolts, lifting her head to stare at him in a mixture of surprise and horror. “Kacchan, I would never-”

“I know,” he cuts her off. “I know. It took me reading two more pages to figure that out. That you weren’t hiding because it was fun.”

“I wanted to tell you,” she insists and it’s true. She hated lying to Katsuki. It was just so fundamentally wrong to lie to him. But this wasn’t like with her name. This wasn’t a secret she could just do with as she wished. It affected more than just herself and she couldn’t risk her skulk the same way she’s willing to risk herself.

She doesn’t really know how to tell him that though.

“I’m still angry, and- and I hate that you could keep a secret this big from me but I… I don’t hate you.”

Izumi nods, because that’s fair.

“I’ll make it up to you,” she promises.

He snorts, knocking the back of his fist against her forehead. “Damn well better, loser. I expect you to be waiting on me hand and foot for the next month.”

 She grabs his wrist, because he’s always so fussy about his hands and the dangers associated thereof, and draws designs into it with the tip of her fingers, just under his new binding.

Katsuki harrumphs but doesn't pull away and she has to smother her smile. “Of course, O Great King Bakugou,” she teases. “I am but your loyal servant.”

“Good,” he says haughtily and she doesn't have to look at him to hear the smirk in his voice. “My first order will be that you have to clean my room for me tomorrow.” He pauses. “Also, never call me ‘Bakugou’ ever again. That shit’s weird.”

Izumi gasps. “I knew you liked the nickname!”

“Eat shit and die.”

It’s not a denial and Izumi can't stop herself from chirping happily. Even when it prompts him into trying to smother her with a pillow.

***

 Katsuki’s gotten good at interpreting Izumi’s moods over the years.

She’s an open book—unlike him—and you’d think that would mean it’s easy to tell what she’s feeling but you would, of course, be wrong.

Sure she expresses herself freely and rarely tries to hide her emotions from anyone, but that means jack shit when half of them just get expressed as ‘start crying immediately’ anyway.

The amount of rage and frustration that first year had been, trying to understand her outbursts and anticipate them… Katsuki still winces at some of the following fights.

But the thing about Izu having a tail and ears, about him being able to see them now? It’s that it makes his job about two hundred percent easier. After a brief adjustment period where he has to relearn all her non-verbal signals with the inclusion of ears and a tail, he settles himself neatly at the top of the list of people who can read her like a book. Higher than, perhaps, even Auntie Inko.

It’s a surprisingly comforting thought. Especially since she’s been able to see through him for years now.

Turnabout's fair play and all that.

***

It’s two days later when Izumi sticks her head in through Katsuki’s window. It’s seven in the morning and they don’t have school today. She expects him to still be in bed but instead, he’s hunched over his desk doing ninth-grade level math they weren’t even assigned.

And he calls her the nerd.

“Hey, Kacchan!” she says brightly, grabbing his attention.

He whirls around, palms already sparking dangerously before he sees her at the window.

“Jesus fuck,” he snaps, glare chilling enough to curdle milk. “I’m gonna kill you.”

Izumi pouts at him, laying her chin on his window sill. “Aww. Kacchan that’s not nice.”

“I don’t give a damn.” He slouches back into his desk chair. Then, slowly he narrows his eyes at her, and by proxy, the window she’s leaning through. “How the fuck are you doing that?”

“What do you mean?” she asks, faux innocence.

The look he gives her is ten kinds of unamused. “My room’s on the second floor.”

“Yeah, so?” Izumi can practically see the steam slowly building in his ears. Smiling, she hoists herself up over the ledge with ease and front flips into the room, arms raised as she sticks the landing.

Katsuki kicks at her legs.

“I hate you,” he says to her form as she sprawls comfortably on the bed.

“Mhmm,” she hums dryly. “Nona sent me over to take inventory of your reliquary. I’m supposed to take whatever’s interesting and burn anything overly insulting.”

He raises an eyebrow at her, challenging.

“They figured I’d be the least conspicuous,” she pauses, pulling a face. “I’m also pretty sure it’s a test of some kind, but I’m not sure what about or why.”

His only answer is a grunt.

“Now, come on and get dressed! We’ve got work to do.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” he snaps but turns around to grab jeans and a black t-shirt with the word ‘SMASH!’ written in red, white, and blue inside a comic book explosion. Idly, she thinks she could probably get that signed for him. He’d like that.

Five minutes later, Izumi descends the stairs with Katsuki in tow to eat breakfast. She tells the Bakugous good morning as she sits at the counter and they regard her with something like amused exasperation. Mitsuki offers to make her scrambled eggs instead of asking how she got into their house without their knowing.

Raising Katsuki taught them when to pick their battles. Meeting little Izumi, who’s as crafty as she is sweet, only served to cement that lesson.

***

The second she steps into the reliquary, her nose wrinkles. Not just at the number of books she’s going to have to sort through—because seriously, were the Takanashis’ some kind of hoarders?—but also at the more… distasteful decorations.

Along the walls and placed on any open space are what Izumi can only assume are meant to be trophies .

Pixie wings pinned carefully onto boards, hollowed horns of more creatures than she can recognize, wings and teeth and claws laid out like cheap prizes. Selkie skins, harpy feathers, swan maiden coats, and wolf fur. Pelts of every color and kind are strung up like tapestries or thrown on the floor like rugs.

Izumi actually hisses when she catches sight of a honey gold fox tail placed in a display case.

There’s more, so much more, but she shuts her eyes and tries to breathe past the smell of death and rot and twisted, hungry magic blanketing the whole room.

She can feel Katsuki frowning at her, hears him shuffle a half step closer to her in an attempt at comfort. “Shoulda warned ya,” he says and it’s about as close to sorry as he gets.

“It’s fine,” she says. “When will your parents be gone?”

There’s a lot in here they need to get out and all of it are things his parents can’t see. Cursed objects in inadequate containers and more remains then she can count that deserve to be put to rest properly.

Kami, her skulk’s going to want to raise the Takanashis from their shallow graves just to kill them all over again when they see this.

“They’re going on a date tonight, actually. They’ll be gone for a couple hours.”

She nods and pulls out her phone to call the house and tell them. This was her job, and she’ll go through the books, but there’s no way she’s touching half the stuff in here without an expert telling her she can. She’s surprised the house hasn’t collapsed with how much malicious magic she can feel in here.

“What books did you already go through? We’ll sort those ones first.”

***

They spend hours down there, skimming through tomes and sorting them into ‘ acceptable’, ‘needs a more thorough read through’, and ‘ just fucking burn it’ piles.

Nona, along with six of Izumi’s grandparents, arrive ten minutes after the Bakugous leave and their reaction to the reliquary is pretty spot on of what she expected. Which is as gratifying as it is mildly terrifying because she doesn’t think she’s ever seen her family so furious before.

Izumi and Katsuki, sometimes with the assistance of actual adults who should be doing this in the first place, make their way through all the books in about a week and a half. She’s actually kind of impressed with the amount that proved not to be total wastes of time.

She’s also, perhaps, a little bit surprised when she doesn’t catch anyone going back through the books and checking her work. No one questions her judgment.

Izumi isn’t sure what to make of that.

***

Yagi: Midoriya, my dear!

I’ve discovered a very interesting fact I think you’d enjoy

Me: oh?

what is it?

Yagi: Did you know french fries weren’t originally made in France?

Me: uh…

i guess ive never thought about it?

where were they invented?

Yagi: They were first cooked in GREECE!

Me: …

Yagi no

Yagi: HAHAHA!

Me: you have the lamest sense of humor

im going to tell everyone about your crime against jokes

Yagi: And I’m sure they will find it equally humorous!

Me: youre lucky i like you

Yagi: Of course my dear.

Me: b/c your puns are horrible

im half convinced you only helped me learn english so you can subject me to this

Yagi: That’s not very nice.

And I would NEVER

Me: mhmmm

are we still on for the skype call in an hour?

Yagi: I wouldn’t miss it.

Me: are you finally gonna tell me what the surprise is?

Yagi: Patience is a virtue, young Izumi.

Me: and sloth is a sin

come on! im super excited!

youve been hinting at it for like,,,, a week

Yagi: Quick-witted as always. Yes. I will be revealing my surprise finally.

Me: yay! :)

see you then!

Yagi: See you then, my dear.

Chapter Text

Yagi’s surprise ends up being that he’s finally coming back to visit.

Izumi is as excited about it as she is terrified.

Mom, by virtue of being the best person in the whole world, knows exactly when Izumi is spiraling too far into her own head and needs a little help getting herself out. It doesn’t matter how much Izumi tries to hide or downplay it, Mom just knows.

So when Mom invites her to spend all of Saturday morning baking brownies and spending quality time together, Izumi knows the game she’s playing. Mom doesn’t pressure her into speaking—she never does—but about twenty minutes into the endeavor Izumi puts down the mixing bowl and sighs.

Like ripping off a bandage, she tries to tell herself.

“How do you tell someone you know about a secret they probably didn’t want you knowing?” she says in a quick rush, leaving her mom blinking trying to decipher the words. 

She waits a beat, and when Mom doesn’t say anything, she steamrolls onwards, falling back on her default setting: rambling.

“Like, if you found out about it by accident and didn’t mean to know but now you do. There’s no taking it back and you don’t want to lie about knowing so you should tell them, right? But the secret is… personal and sensitive, probably, so you should tell them gently. But how do you do that? Is there a way to ease someone into that kind of thing? Does this-”

Her mom settles a gentle hand on her arm, lips pulled up at the corners but her eyes filled with understanding. “In my experience,” she starts, “all it takes is sitting the person down and telling them that you know.”

“But what if they get mad?” Izumi worries. “Or upset? Then what?”

Mom hums. “They might. It depends on the person.”

Izumi’s ears are already starting to flatten against her skull, dread pooling in her stomach when her mom taps her arm again to regain her attention.

“But,” Mom continues knowingly, “If you explain what happened and how it was an accident, they’ll understand. If they’re a reasonable sort of person, I have no doubt they’ll forgive you.”

Izumi worries at her lip, staring down at the brownie batter like it holds all the answers.

Yagi is someone she’d call reasonable. He always makes time to listen to her, and he’s All Might. Being kind and nice and reassuring is his whole thing.

So, is it… could it really be that easy?

***

It’s a good thing Katsuki’s in the know now.

There are plenty of reasons this is true—not in the least because she doesn't have to lie to him anymore—but currently? She thinks it’s pretty good because it’d be really hard to explain the whole snarling monster with sharp teeth trying to kill them if he didn’t.

“Move!” she shouts, hands slamming into his back to get him going.

The thing with too many teeth and claws takes a swipe at them and Izumi doesn’t even think about it before she’s moving to take the hit meant for Katsuki. He’s going to be pissed about her protecting him but the thing catches her in the ribs, tearing her skin to ribbons and Izumi knows that’s the kind of wound that would kill a human so if Katsuki wants to take issue with it, that’s too damn bad.

She screams, and she thinks Katsuki might be screaming too.

She doesn’t fall—because this isn’t the first hit she’s taken from a creature, even if it might be the worst—so she’s able to claw at the things face enough to get it to back off.

It only gets as far as a backwards step before Katsuki is there, snarling and hands pressed up against the thing’s throat. And then the world erupts into light and heat and the creature is no more.

“Izumi!” he’s at her side in the next moment, face doing strange things as he stares at the claw marks in her side. “What the hell was that? What were you thinking?”

She presses a hand to her wound and hisses. Katsuki’s eyebrows do something complicated and distinctly unhappy.

“I was thinking I didn’t want you to die,” she says breathlessly. “I’ll heal. You won’t.”

He scowls at her and his hands curl into half fists. If he hadn’t just used everything in him to reduce the creature to tiny bits, she’s sure the air would be filled with the familiar crackle-pop of his explosions.

“I don’t want you protecting me,” he snaps.

“Too fucking bad,” she snaps right back, startling him. “You’re skulk, and more than that, you’re my best friend. If you think I’m going to stand back and watch you get hurt you haven’t been paying enough attention.”

He snarls soundlessly at her, so fox-like without even realizing.

Katsuki doesn’t say anything else to her, but she’s not naive enough to think that’s the end of it. He’s prideful and arrogant and one conversation won’t suddenly change that. They’ll fight about this again, but Izumi won’t bend for this either.

Katsuki will just have to learn to live with it.

***

It’s not until later, when the pain has subsided and the anger cooled, does Izumi realize that she called Katsuki skulk. She's known of course, but it's the first time she's said it aloud.

She wonders if Katsuki caught it.

She wonders if he understands what it means.

***

Katsuki gives her the silent treatment for a whole three days after she gets nearly disemboweled to save him.

Well- his version of the silent treatment, which isn’t very silent and mostly involves a lot of yelling and threatening to blow her up.

But, when he does actually aim an explosion at her face and she refuses to move, the only thing that hits her is smoke and noise. So, you know.

She figures he’s mad but not actually out to murder her which is nice. He did half-drag, half-carry her home while her side stitched itself back together after all so maybe that’s not as much of a surprise as she thinks it is.

***

The moment she sees Yagi, he’s already reaching down and sweeping her up into his arms, twirling them around with that great strength of his. Her arms are wound around his neck and she’s laughing and crying at the same time, so happy she can’t keep it all in her chest.

Yagi doesn't put her down for a whole five minutes, even when her mom and aunts keep making pointedly amused comments. Not that Izumi is complaining.

She’s missed him so much that her chest had ached with it. But now Yagi is here, right next to her, and Izumi has all of the people she loves right where she can get to them.

It feels like someone’s finally put the world back on right.

***

She runs away to Yagi’s for three whole days with her mother’s permission.

She and Yagi make a mess of his kitchen, and talk for hours about the time they were apart as if they hadn’t spoken nearly everyday about it all.

Izumi regales him with the schoolyard drama she’s stopped recently, before excitedly asking after the support heroes at Might Tower. Yagi always describes his coworkers vaguely, but if Izumi thinks about it, she can figure out which hero he’s talking about. The personal anecdotes Yagi tells her are always her favorite Hero stories. He makes titans seem like normal people, the same way knowing Yagi has made Izumi see All Might.

At night, Yagi forces her to watch old, American movies with him. He says they’re all ‘classics’ but she can’t help but find them all ridiculous. 

She watches them though. Because Yagi likes them and it’s a full, uninterrupted two hours she gets to burrow into his side for. Sometimes even longer if he falls asleep before the movie ends.

In the mornings, Yagi makes her American breakfasts while she sits on the counter and analyzes the Hero fights on the morning news. She breaks down quirks as he pours the pancake batter and is coming up with viable support items or techniques by the time he takes them off the griddle.

He smiles indulgently at her the whole time, even when she can tell he didn’t understand a word she just said.

“Remind me someday to introduce you to Melissa,” he says during a break where she pauses for breath. “You two would get along like a house on fire.”

On the fourth morning, Izumi is still sitting on the counter while Yagi makes breakfast, but she’s barely said a word. She’s making Yagi nervous, she knows. And, truthfully, she’s right there with him.

The words have been pressing against the back of her teeth for days. 

“I know you’re All Might,” she blurts without warning or preamble.

Yagi startles, turning to blink at her, once, twice, three times.

She bites her lip, ears pressed flat as she waits for his reaction. It’s… a bit anticlimactic actually.

“Well,” he says, lips curling up into a bright smile as his hand reaches out to ruffle her hair. “Can’t say I didn’t expect that. Knew you’d figure it out eventually.”

Izumi stares at him. “You knew?”

Yagi shrugs, just a bit amused as he returns to the pancakes. “No. Not really. But you’re too clever for me to think I could keep it from you for long. Though I had hoped it’d be a while yet.”

Absently, Izumi wonders if it’s wise to tell him she figured it out months ago.

***

With that not-quite-secret out in the open between them now, something about them seems to settle more solidly into place. There are only five other people in the world who know that Yagi Toshinori and All Might are one in the same, and something about that makes Izumi both warm at her center and unbearably sad.

(Sometimes, she thinks, it seems like Yagi has no one else in the world but her. The thought makes her furious.)

Izumi spends the rest of the week and a half playing a delicate balancing act between Yagi, Katsuki, her family, school and all her extracurriculars. She only manages it at all because the important things overlap nicely enough that she can multitask.

Like the fact that Katsuki spends most days at her house now, and that Yagi likes to walk with her around town as she runs errands, and that her Aunties Umi and Isami seem to have a bet about which of them can make Yagi blush harder (without making him choke on blood of course; that’s an automatic fail).

She doesn’t think she stops smiling once the whole time.

***

She spends almost the entire morning before Yagi’s supposed to leave clinging to him like a stubborn burr, lecturing him on taking care of himself like he’s supposed to and being safe—or as safe as he can be in his line of work.

Yagi bears her fussing with the grace of someone who’s gone too long without it, but promises to do his best at following her new rules.

When the car meant to take him away arrives, the hug they share is crushing--more than any normal human could withstand, not that she thinks Yagi notices. He presses a reverent kiss to her forehead, and buries his face in her wild riot of curls.

“I’m going to miss you,” she tells him through the tears she tried so hard to keep back.

“And I you, my dear girl.”

“Stay safe,” she asks-demands- pleads. “Just- take care of yourself and stay safe, alright?”

He squeezes her tighter for a fraction of a second.

“I’ll do my best,” he says and it’s not a Promise. It can’t be, because what she’s asking isn’t something he can give. Not really anyway. 

He kisses her forehead again before setting her down.

Watching him leave is just as hard the second time, as it was the first.

***

She curls in her bed that night, Katsuki sprawled out close enough to touch while she drowns in a shirt she’d stolen from Yagi.

Her room smells like all the people she loves even if they aren’t all there. It’s comforting.

It also makes her chest ache.

***

She does a lot of thinking over the next week, in between her bouts of sadness and calls with Yagi.

At the end, she’s come to a decision. 

The next day, she spends two hours having to convince Nona to go along with it.

***

Izumi’s gotten pretty good at scaling the wall up to Katsuki’s window, if she says so herself.

She knocks lightly and waits patiently for Katsuki’s grumpy frown to appear in front of the window. 

“What are you doing here?” he snaps groggily. “You weirdos don’t make kadomatsu at midnight right? Because if you do, I don't want to be invited anymore.”

Izumi snorts and grins. “Nope! Kadomastu making is tomorrow-”

“It is tomorrow,” he grumbles crankily, which Izumi charitably ignores.

“-but get dressed anyway! Something you’d wear into the woods. I promise it’s worth losing your precious beauty sleep over.”

“Fuckin’ better be.” He swats at her, slow but with force, and she almost loses her grip on the window ledge. But Katsuki already turned around to rifle through his drawers and, thankfully, doesn’t see her undignified scramble for purchase.

***

When Izumi was young, her mother explained that there is more to being Sha’alim Jinn than just mischief and magic. 

Nothing is without price, her mother had warned. To be something so powerful, there are responsibilities one must bear.

(Some of which, Izumi thinks with not a small amount of excitement as she drags Katsuki further into the woods, are better than others.)

***

By the time she and Katsuki break through the trees into the clearing all her family has gathered in, it’s already started.

The clearing is wide, about the size of a tennis court, and there is very little room not being used. Her family takes up most of it, dancing and singing and laughing beneath the willow trees. On the far side, there is a long table, set with offerings and plates laden heavy with food and drink. Closer to her, are chairs for the members who aren’t quite spry enough for dancing, but happy to play music and lead the singing for songs.

And then, most noticeable, are the restless spirits her family has summoned, little more than formless lights floating happily about their heads. They are kaleidoscopes on the wind, mesmerizing and enchanting and the reason Izumi holds the night of the new moon so close to her chest.

She turns to Katsuki, looking for his reaction, and finds him stunned.

There’s something in the way his eyes can’t seem to settle on any one place, the way they focus and unfocus, that lets her know what he sees is not necessarily what she does. She’s curious what his Sight reveals, but that’s a question for later, she thinks.

“What… what is this?” Katsuki asks her, sounding distinctly breathless.

“Rikud mavet,” she says, and watches as his whole body seems to jolt, gaze swinging towards her abruptly.

So he does know the meaning then.

Good. Izumi was worried she’d have to explain it. Which she could do, but it’s easier if he already knows.

Probably learned about it in his reliquary books—or as much as he could learn, she supposes. Those books were written by outsiders, and it's hard to get anything concrete from them when they had ever been present for a rikud mavet.

She watches, unable to hide her delighted smile, as Katsuki uselessly opens and closes his mouth, eyes darting from hers to whatever it is he can see in the clearing that she can’t. Eventually he shuts it, jaw clenched so hard she worries for his teeth.

The nervousness is there again; that same uncertainty he had when, two months ago, he told her that he knew.

“You’re skulk,” she says and turns it into a declaration with the force behind it. She’s told him once, and she meant it, but now she needs him to understand. “Rikud mavet is always open to you.”

He’s silent for a long moment, his hands flexing at his sides as he struggles to take all of this in.

She waits.

Then he nods, clears his throat, and goes to nod again before stopping and scowling at himself. She keeps standing there, smiling at him with as much affection she can manage—which is a lot. So she isn’t all that surprised when Katsuki shoves her face away and yells something about her being “so fucking embarrassing.”

She laughs instead of any normal reaction she could have had, and grabs his wrist before he can stuff his hand back in his pocket.

“Come on,” she urges, already pulling him along, “It’s not rikud mavet if you don’t dance.”

“I don’t dance,” he snaps. It’s not all that believable when he says it and it’s less so when five minutes later, he’s leading her through the ‘ridiculous, showpony dances’ he says he hates but knows all the steps to.

They don’t stop dancing until the sun rises over the willow.

***

Katsuki comes to every rikud mavet after that and it makes something warm settle happily in the center of Izumi’s chest every time.

He doesn’t always want to dance—because he really doesn’t like dancing all that much even though he can—and on those nights he plays the drums instead, a vibrant spotlight in the middle of the skulk elders who coo and tut at him in equal measure.

Izumi is glad that Katsuki is there—more than glad, actually. But every time she sees him sitting at the drums, all she can imagine is Yagi sitting there too, clapping his hands to the rhythm because he’s a terrible singer and dancer and can’t play an instrument.

Yagi would be happy, she knows, nestled in the middle of people who cared about him. He’d laugh, because rikud mavet is about joy and moving forward. He’d smile because it’s about sending restless spirits on their way, even the ones in your chest (and Izumi knows he has more than a few of his own).

She brings Katsuki to rikud mavet because she wants him there—because he belongs there—but also because she knows that Yagi can’t be.

Izumi knows Yagi’s secret, but he doesn't know hers.

And that makes her ache nearly as much as him leaving did.

***

Aunt Umi bursts through the front door suddenly enough that it catches Izumi’s attention all the way from upstairs. Her head swivels, staring out at her floor like if she tries hard enough she can catch a glimpse of Aunt Umi through it if she tries hard enough.

Her cousin is panicked by something, her heartbeat jackrabbiting in her chest, and it sets Izumi on edge.

Katsuki notices, but before he can say anything, Aunt Umi announces to the living room at large that there’s a vampire prowling along their northern border and Izumi’s already up off her bed and pounding down the stairs.

Everyone’s yelling and she sees Uncle Kazuki already has his phone in his hands to call Uncle Kyo back from the joke shop immediately and Aunt Isami after that. It's pandemonium and Aunt Umi stands in the middle with Aoi pressed against her side.

Katsuki is halfway down the stairs when Nona steps out of her office. Her eyes flash silver only once as they sweep over the room, and everyone goes silent.

Nona turns to Aunt Umi. “You’re sure it was only one? Could you have missed a companion who might’ve been farther off?”

Aunt Umi shakes her head, something heavy in her eyes. “No, they… there couldn’t have been more. Not with how-” She stops for a moment, eyes closed before continuing. “There’s no Nest. Only one.”

Whispers break out across the living room, fervent and sad, and Izumi stands at the bottom of the stairs and feels horror well up in her chest.

A Nest of vampires is one thing, they’re able to be reasoned with as much as any other sentient yōkai. But a lone vampire? That’s just… that’s horrible.

She doesn’t realize that there’s tears in her eyes until Katsuki presses firmly against her shoulder with his own. She’s only half listening as Nona doles out orders, a commander organizing troops. Most of the family is being put on guard duty, making sure the vampire doesn’t make it to town. Nona’s also posting look outs and building a rotating schedule for both with Nana Naoki and Gramps.

No one has said anything about fighting.

“It’s just one vamp, isn’t it?” Katsuki asks, slightly incredulous. “Not even a Nest of them trying to move in. What’s the problem?”

“A Nest would be simpler,” she says faintly.

“More vampires would be simpler?” he sounds baffled now and Izumi has to remind herself that he didn’t grow up on stories of her yōkai brethren. He’s only known about all of this for a few months and is still working his way through their bestiaries.

Katsuki doesn’t understand what this means , and the only thing he hates more than not understanding is admitting it. She’s not sure how to explain it in a way without crying though, or pissing him off by being patronizing.

Thankfully, Mom saves the day, tucking Izumi into the safety of her arms and answering Katsuki’s unspoken questions. “You know what a vampire is, dear?”

Katsuki looks like he wants to scoff but doesn’t. He’s never disrespectful to Mom, never even yelled at her, though he gets into regular screaming matches with Aunt Mitsuki.

“They’re corpses reanimated by wild magic.”

Mom nods, hand absently stroking Izumi’s curls. “That’s right. Vampires are made rather than born, but they’re never made alone. A vampire is a part of a group from the beginning. Many describe the bond a vampire shares with their Nest—the ones they were reanimated with—as one part of a whole. A vampire is their Nest, just like your hand is you.”

Her mom stops a moment and Izumi tightens her arms just a bit, not enough to hurt like she has to be careful about not doing, but enough to comfort, enough to hold them both together.

Facing a lone vampire for anyone who understands what it means is rough, but Izumi thinks it hits her skulk particularly hard. And how couldn’t it, with their history? With how it hits so close to home?

Behind her, Izumi can sense the growing unease welling up in Katsuki, can practically feel the horror in her chest reflected in his own as he connects the dots.

He’s smart, smarter than most give him credit for, and it doesn’t take much for him to figure it out.

“So that vampire has been…”

Mom takes a deep breath. “A lone vampire is a vampire that’s been mutilated. Without their Nest, there’s barely anything of them left. Not even enough magic to keep the poor thing going. It drives them mad, the slow, painful death of starvation. They forget how to tap into ley lines or the latent magic surrounding other yōkai.”

“It’s why lone vampires drink blood,” Izumi adds quietly. “They’re looking for life magic.”

There are also theories that the blood drinking and killing is a misguided attempt by an insane vampire to raise a new Nest. But that idea had always seemed so sad to Izumi. Because even if a new Nest did rise, that vampire wouldn’t be a part of it.

They’d still just be all alone.

“What happened to their Nest?” Katsuki asks, but by the sound of his voice Izumi knows he’s already guessed. Is already thinking the same thing everyone has been hoping it isn’t.

Hunters.

***

The vampire doesn’t head for town.

According to Uncle Kyo, she’s obsessed with the willow tree and doesn't even make it past the clearing. Vampires, even lone ones, are known to have some of the most sensitive noses and her skulk loves this land and its people and they take good care of it. The life magic is strong and vibrant and made stronger still by the ley lines they live over. It’s not like this vampire could have just missed the thriving town right there next to her. 

“It’s the strangest thing,” he tells her. “If the poor bastard isn’t trying to nestle amongst the roots, she’s clawing at the bark like she hopes to crawl into the trunk itself. Sometimes I think she might even be crying.”

The odd behavior stumps the whole family. They keep a close eye on her, not quite sure what to do with her, but knowing they can’t let her out of their sight.

Days pass, and no hunters show up looking for the lone vampire. Likely, whatever hunter she escaped from killed the rest of her Nest and believed she wouldn’t last long and wasn’t worth the trouble to chase after. She’s probably been alone for months now, if the description Aunt Umi gave is any indication. 

The whole situation has the skulk on edge. No one is allowed in the willow clearing and, as the youngest,  she and Katsuki are kept under close supervision until everything is resolved. Katsuki takes near immediate offense to ‘being babied’ and chafes against it with an energy Izuku hasn’t seen since she first told him she wanted to be a hero.

Two weeks pass and when they miss rikud mavet, Katsuki’s indignation becomes too much for Izumi to corral. He decides that if the family can’t deal with the vampire, then he will.

 Izumi thinks that, for being the self proclaimed ‘only one of them with any sense’, he sure likes to run headlong into danger without thinking it through. Katsuki is capable, she knows that. He’s yet to lose a fight he’s been in, but his constant need to prove himself the uncontested victor in everything makes her want to scream.

“This is such a bad idea,” she hisses at him, hand clamped tightly around his wrist like he’ll run off the second she loosens her grip. “I can’t believe we’re doing this. Do you understand how much Nona is going to kill us?”

“You didn’t have to come,” he snaps. “Can do this by my-damn-self.”

“I’m not going to knowingly let you take on a vampire by yourself,” she argues, voice raising just a bit to let him know how ridiculous she thinks the idea is.

He shoots her a dark look. “Think I can’t do it?”

Izumi doesn’t back down. “Just because you can do it alone, doesn’t mean you should,” she argues, almost by rote. This isn’t the first time they’ve had this argument and it won’t be the last, either.

As the months had passed, she and Katsuki had kept stumbling upon things lurking in the woods. It wasn’t anything as bad as that first time, more along the lines of what she’d been dealing with since she was nine. Small yōkai that were easy to trick or smart enough to reason with.

But Aoi and Mom still fuss over them whenever they come back home scuffed or winded and Izumi can’t even begin to imagine the lecture they’re going to get when Mom finds out they’ve done this. 

Katsuki scoffs. “You don’t get to decide what I should or shouldn’t do, idiot.”

“But I get to decide what I should do, and I’ve decided that I should help my best friend.” She pauses. “Even when I think his ideas are stupid.”

“I don’t need your help,” he snaps.

“And I don’t care,” Izumi snaps back. She’s grateful Katsuki doesn’t have the ability to detect lies like she can, because that might be one of the biggest ones she’s ever told him.

It bothers her so much that he never wants help from her. He never asks and when she offers he recoils like she insulted his pride. And whenever he does accept something from her, it’s always a careful trade off, like she’s making a fae deal with him--equal exchange. No more, no less, like he’s got a mental list of checks and balances he’s careful to maintain between them.

Debts mean something to foxes, but they mean so very little to Izumi and they mean even less when it’s Katsuki. She wishes it didn’t mean anything to him either. He knows her name and she knows his. What else could compare to that?

“You’re such a pain in the ass, Freckles,” Katsuki complains. “You know that?”

“You certainly tell me enough that I should,” she grumbles back, hand tightening around his wrist. He doesn’t shake her off, but it’s hard to tell if it’s because he doesn’t mind or because he knows he can’t make her let go.

They fall into silence after that, getting closer to the clearing now. Izumi can smell the vampire before she can see her. The scent of graveyard dirt and rotten wood and petrichor growing so strong the closer they get to the willow clearing that it almost makes her want to gag.

The vampire has been camped out there for a while now and none of her skulk has gotten close so, logically, it makes sense that her scent would be overpowering. But emotionally, all Izumi can think is how wrong it is for the clearing to smell like death rather than family.

The vampire was young when she died, somewhere around Aoi’s age, which meant late twenties. Her skin was a dark brown, a pretty color if not for the ashen quality. She looked in danger of turning dark gray without any blood pumping beneath her skin, a stone in human shape.

Her hair was a darker shade of the same, wild and curly around her head but not in the half artful way Izumi has seen Aunt Umi style hers. It looked like it was simply forgotten about, with tree branches and dirt in it and smeared all across the rest of her.

Her eyes were the only colorful thing about her, a bright amber that glowed with almost feverish intensity in the moonlight. Izumi wasn’t sure the vampire was aware of many things, but her wide, unfocused eyes locked onto her and Katsuki the moment they stepped close to the treeline.

It makes her breath catch in her throat.

She’s fought off creatures and fellow yōkai before, but nothing like this. Nothing sentient and so humanly shaped. Nothing that didn’t deserve to be fought, that was only a threat because of something they couldn’t control.

“The little fox and her firecracker,” the vampire lilts, voice soft but strong enough to be heard even by Katsuki. “You’ve kept me waiting an awful long time. Mummy always said it’s rude to keep a lady waiting, didn’t you know?”

Katsuki stiffens next to her and Izumi feels like she’s in the same boat, ice slipping down her spine.

“What the hell's that supposed to mean?” Katsuki spits and it’s only the grip Izumi still has on his wrist that stops him from stepping closer. No need for him to make himself an even easier target for the crazy vampire who seems to know them.

“Course,” the vampire continues as if she hadn’t ever heard Katsuki speak. “Mummy’s dead now, so what does she know? The hunters made her go poof with all my brothers and sisters. And now I’m all alone.”

“What brought you here?” Izumi asks, doing her best to sound like the Matriarch she’s training to be and not a scared little kid. “What are you looking for?” 

A wide smile takes over her face and Izumi has the conflicting urge to both hide behind Katsuki and push him to hide behind her. “Why, magic, of course. It’s always about the magic, niblet. Don’t you know?” The vampire snaps her teeth at Izumi, laughing at the way it makes her jump. “The wind led me here to where the magic grew. Whispering like birds around my head.”

“The town is still a mile that way,” Izumi argues. “You haven’t found the magic yet.”

Katsuki elbows her in the ribs, hissing at her to shut up. And, okay, so Izumi probably shouldn’t be encouraging the insane vampire to head for town, but this whole situation doesn’t make any sense at all and she wants answers alright? So many things in her life lack answers at the moment; this doesn’t have to be one of them.

And it’s only a matter of time before Katsuki loses his patience and launches himself at the vampire so she has to be quick.

“Liar,” the vampire hisses, flashing her long canines. “It bleeds from the roots of your willow and soaks the Earth here. I can smell it.” She pauses, narrows her eyes. “It’s all over you, little fox.”

Izumi blinks. “Huh?”

“The willow magic, all stuffed inside you, fit to bursting. The tree is a nut too tough to crack, but you, little fox…” something shifts in the vampire’s eyes then, going sharp as a knife’s edge, “you are far too easy to break.”

The vampire lunges at her and Izumi is so startled by how fast she moves that she only doesn’t get her throat torn out because Katsuki shoves her out of the way. “Move!” he shouts and sets off an explosion as he does. It’s not aimed at the vampire because he’s only quick enough to get his hand half-way there, but it’s loud and bright and the vampire hisses as she recoils from it.

“Naughty firecracker!” the vampire shrieks. “Mummy would have you punished!”

“Yeah?” Katsuki scoffs, hands held at the ready, “Go cry to her about it then!” He lunges forward and sets off another explosion, managing to singe the vampire’s forearm before she darts away. 

Izumi, who’d rolled to her feet as soon as she gained her bearings, darts forward and tries to get a swipe in while the vampire has her back turned. Her claws find their mark and the vampire screams, turning to backhand her. Izumi ducks, but she’s not quite fast enough. The vampire clips her in the temple and there’s enough strength in it that her ears ring--more than Katsuki’s explosions were making them already.

Izumi shakes off the blow and bares her teeth. “We don’t want to fight you! We want to help!”

“What help can you give but the magic in your veins?” the vampire hisses back and lunges, claws outstretched. The vampire is stronger than her, and each blow rattles her teeth, but Izumi is faster, if barely. Blows that should have shattered her ribcage become glancing bruises as she dodges them.

When she begins to flag, Izumi quickly retreats, her feet flying across the ground as Katsuki takes her place. “ Die!” he shouts, stunning the vampire with a disorientating blast to the face.

Katsuki’s nowhere near as fast as she is and he’s certainly not stronger than the vampire, but his attacks are more effective. Vampires aren’t as flammable as movies believe, but they have a certain weakness to it. He takes more hits, but the vampire rapidly begins looking more hurt.

Izumi catches her breath, and looks around for anything that can help them, but all there is is wood. Izumi doesn’t want to kill her. She’s hurt and confused and more alone than she’s ever been since her reanimation. Can Izumi justify killing someone who’s little more than a cornered animal lashing out? Can she justify letting her suffer?

Izumi stays still too long. The vampire finally catches Katsuki off guard and knocks him to the ground. She’s on him in the next moment, pinning him beneath her, pressing his palms flat to his chest. He kicks out at her and struggles, but she’s bigger and stronger than him.

“Naughty little firecracker!” she hisses. “Playing forbidden games and breaking rules. Mummy will send you to bed without dinner!”

“Choke and die!” Katsuki spits, despite the hand wrapped around his neck.

“Mind your manners ,” the vampire scolds, surging for his throat.

Katsuki shouts, eyes going wide with sudden panic and Izumi is barreling into the vampire before she even realizes she’s moving.

She’s crouched over the vampire, the same way she was crouched over Katsuki only moments before. There’s a piece of wood Izumi doesn’t recall picking up clutched in her hand, the tip plunged into the vampire’s chest.

For a moment, everything is still. They sit there, staring at each other for a small eternity, before the vampire speaks up. “Thank you,” she smiles with blood stained teeth, “I didn’t want to be alone anymore.”

Izumi flinches. “No, I… I didn’t-”

“You did.” She grabs the hand holding the makeshift stake and presses it deeper into her chest, deeper into the heart beneath. “Foolish fox, you possess the magic of generations. Do not second guess your choices.”

“But I-” The vampire crumbles to ash and dust beneath her before she can figure out how she was going to finish that. The normal bright sting of victory is absent, replaced by a bitter taste in the back of her throat.

Izumi jolts. “Kacchan!” She twists, scrambling over to where he’s half propped up on the ground, a hand pressed tightly to the side of his neck. “Are you alright?”

“The bitch fucking bit me,” he answers and Izumi can see blood leaking from between his fingers. She fumbles for her small bag of talismans. She’d grabbed some of Auntie Umi’s healing ones before they’d left just in case.

Izumi is good at magic, but she’s good at that in the way one is good at walking. Continuing that metaphor, healing magic is a trapeze act, tricky and something Izumi would actually need to practice at if she doesn’t want to accidentally kill Katsuki while trying to save him.

Quickly, she moves Katsuki’s hand and replaces it with the talisman as quickly as she can. There’s more blood than Izumi is all that comfortable with coming out of Katsuki, but it’s slowing. She has the urge to put another blood clotting talisman on him, just to be safe, but layering talismans like that can be dangerous even if they have the same magical effect, so she doesn't.

“We should get you back to the house.” There’s blood all on his right shoulder and she’s covered in dust all down her front. Everyone will know what they’ve done the second they walk through the door. They're going to be in so much trouble but it’s not like there’s anything she can do about that now.

She helps Katsuki woozily to his feet while he glares at her. “You’re crying,” he says, and reaches up a hand to wipe at her cheek. He mostly just smears blood on her face instead of whatever he was trying to do, but Izumi’s too tired to care about it.

“I’m always crying,” she repeats his own words back at him. He doesn’t call her a crybaby for nothing, after all.

He hums unhappily and Izumi starts leading them out of the forest and back home. “Well stop. We won. You’re not supposed to cry when we win.”

“Did we though?” she asks. “It doesn’t feel like it.”

He frowns. “Of course we won.” He pauses. He’s quiet for so long that Izumi stops thinking he’s going to continue until: “We’re the ones left standing. For better or for worse.”

Izumi hums. For better or for worse.

***

They’re grounded, obviously. 

Everyone had been so mad and worried and disappointed in them that Izumi hadn’t known what to do with herself. And Katsuki had been upset too, even if he’d never admit it. She could tell just by how quiet he was, thoughts rolling around his head but never making it out of his mouth.

Mom had even called Yagi that first day, mostly to tell him that Izumi wouldn’t be available as easily for the next two weeks so he shouldn’t worry if she doesn’t answer right away. But of course, Yagi had asked why and when Mom had given him an edited version of what went down, then Yagi gave her another lecture that was far more hypocritical when coming from him. Not that it still didn't make her feel bad. It’s Yagi and she could hear the way he kept coughing up blood because he was so worked up. She wanted to curl into a tiny ball of guilt by the end of the call.

Their official sentence was two weeks of house arrest and being temporarily banned from any of their normal extracurriculars, including the unofficial ones. They’ve been given a plethora of chores to complete with their newfound free time, but compared to the schedule they were used to following… well, the days pass like molasses.

Their punishment was turning out to be more of a lesson in finding new ways of entertaining themselves. Which was probably the actual punishment, if she thinks about it. Everyone knows how bad she and Katsuki are at the whole ‘doing nothing’ thing; see: how they got in trouble in the first place.

It’s making Katsuki more irritable than usual and Izumi clingier, which is an understandably volatile combination. Honestly? They’ll be lucky if they make it out of this without getting grounded again for pushing each other’s buttons so much.

By the halfway point, Izumi’s already made Katsuki explode three mugs while he’s made her cry three times—at least once from anger. She nearly punched him in the face and the only reason she hadn’t was because they were in school at the time.

It’s one thing for her and Katsuki to come home with bruises, but it’s another to come home with bruises and a detention slip. Best not to test their luck.

Chapter Text

Yagi comes to visit a week after she and Kacchan are ungrounded again. It comes mostly out of nowhere and she notices him hovering more than usual so she’s not surprised when he finally springs a Serious Talk on her about taking care of herself and not rushing into danger. It’s vaguely hypocritical of him considering everything but he also introduces her to Melissa and David—”please, Mr Shield is so formal! And I feel I already know you with how much Toshi goes on.””—over video chat which she guesses makes up for it.

After the introductions, she wastes no time in peppering David with question after question about his inventions and scientific work regarding quirk effects. It’s not long before the one sided interrogation quickly devolves into a debate about quirk theory and analysis—something Izumi takes great pride in staying on top of and having skill with—and a semi-lecture about support equipment that Melissa joins in on every so often.

And Melissa is amazing. Not the same type of amazing her dad is, of course, but that’s like trying to compare Katsuki to All Might. They’re both her heroes, but All Might is just a bit… farther from her reach. More polished.

(Yagi, in her mind, is placed in some strange halfway point between Katsuki and All Might—which confuses her about as much as it makes perfect sense.)

Melissa is two years older than her and Katsuki, just starting out at I-Island Academy to be a support engineer, but doesn’t once act like Izumi’s a little kid. She’s nice and clever and wants to help people with her inventions, to make the world a better place for the people in it just like Izumi does. 

It takes only about twenty minutes of talking to the older girl for Izumi to decide that Melissa is one of her new favorite people.

Dinner rolls around before the natural conclusion of the conversation does, and Yagi insists that she go home to eat with her family after spending so many hours cooped up in front of the computer. She grumbles, but moves to comply.

The parting words she hears after saying goodbye and walking out the door is David telling Yagi that, “You got a real firecracker on your hands there, Toshi.”

She blushes, slightly embarrassed but it’s quickly swept aside by a great warmth in her chest when Yagi says back, unbearably fond, “She’s got spirit, that’s for sure. Wouldn’t trade her for the world.”

***

Time moves on and eventually Izumi and Katsuki are allowed to return to their normal activities without her whole family watching over them suspiciously..

Izumi continues taking gymnastics and aikido, and Katsuki is allowed back on the wrestling team. They’re both top of their class, Izumi placing first for subjects like foreign language, literature and history, while Katsuki dominates the sciences and math.

Katsuki turns thirteen and Izumi throws him two parties. The usual one, with the shiny new addition of Yagi who came specifically for the party, and then another one that was skulk members only.

Izumi spends weekends running around town, picking up odd jobs and volunteering wherever she’s needed, only stopping when Katsuki, Aoi or Mom forces her to. The kids at school keep expecting her to mediate fights, and she keeps doing so. Hero Analysis for the Future #13 is finally filled fit to bursting, and she nestles it on her shelf along with the others as she starts a new one.

And then Izumi turns thirteen and her family begins acting… weird.

The day of is happy enough, with all the people she loves gathered close and celebrating. But the moment ends and suddenly everyone’s acting like she’s made of glass, tiptoeing around her and whispering low enough that she can’t hear.

They’re acting like something bad is going to happen but no one will tell her what.

And then, just around the time where she begins getting truly upset about everyone keeping things from her, Nona calls for her.

“Matriarch,” she greets with a bow and stands before the large desk. Her mom and Aoi are there, standing just to either side of Nona, but the looks on their faces are anything but comforting.  “You wanted to speak to me?”

Nona’s lips are pressed into a thin line, and her eyes lack all the warmth and affection Izumi normally sees in them. Its absence makes the hairs on the back of her neck rise and her stomach churn.

“I think,” Nona says, calm and without much inflection, “It’s time you knew our history. Our full history.”

Her eyebrows furrow, and she looks at Aoi and Mom, but neither will meet her eyes. “You mean about… the curse?” she asks, hesitant and scared. No one’s ever spoken to her about it. Izumi always suspected Nona ordered them not to.

“Yes,” her Nona says and then she talks and talks and talks-

***

Most hunters, Izumi knows, are perfectly fine people who only ever go after things that come after them first. Many never would’ve looked twice at the Midoriya Skulk—at any skulk, really. They are beings that were too powerful and too much trouble for no reason.

Sha’alim jinn didn’t kill humans. In fact, most of the time they were doing the Hunters’ jobs for them by getting rid of the things that wandered onto their land.

Most Hunters, of course, didn’t mean all Hunters.

There was always something a bit off about the Takanashis, something even other Hunters picked up on. A proud lineage, an arrogant one, that thought themselves so mighty that they could do no wrong.

It led to their downfall. But not before they dragged Izumi’s skulk halfway down with them.

No one knows why the Takanashis snapped, no concrete reason anyway. There are rumors, of course. But they’re ridiculous fairy tales no one had ever put stock into.

(Izumi watches though, the way her mother shifts and Aoi scowls, and knows there are things being left unsaid.)

But, whatever the reason, the Takanashis attacked them. Not with silver or steel or brute force, as they were known, but with the one thing the Midoriyas never expected because it had seemed so laughable.

The Takanashis attacked them with magic.

And the horrible thing is that they almost won.

“That first wave took the most powerful of us,” her Nona explains. “Among them was my great aunt, the previous Matriarch. There were only a few Takanashis that survived our retaliation, but by then the damage was done.”

So the Midoriyas hid. They pretended they were killed off, that they took the Takanashis down with them in their final throes of death because the curse was strong then. Was a boulder above all their heads, waiting to crash down on them all.

(And most Hunters aren’t all Hunters. The Takanashis weren’t the only rogues, only the loudest and most unapologetic.

If word got out that the Midoriyas were weakened rather than dead— that there was a prize to be gained from seeking them out—well. Foxes do not dwell on what ifs.)

“What the curse couldn’t kill quickly, it kills slowly. Less foxes are being born, less children in general. Our magic struggles to answer our call the older we grow.”

Izumi furrows her eyebrows. She knows this. It’s nice to have it confirmed, cause no one had ever told her this was how it all worked, but she’s smart and clever and pays attention. She already knew all of this.

She waits, sure that her Nona will continue.

Izumi will wish she hadn’t though.

“The curse is meant to kill us,” she starts again, slowly. “But it can’t do that if we run away.”

Izumi has only a second to be confused, a broken thought of ‘then why had we stayed for so long?’, before it all clicks in horrific clarity.

“No,” she says, begs- pleads. “No.”

But Nona keeps speaking and Izumi wants nothing more than to cover her ears and pretend she can’t hear. To pretend that none of this is happening and her dreams aren’t being viciously ripped from her own hands as she watches.

“We can’t leave the forest. You can’t leave the forest.”

And Izumi crumbles.

***

She doesn’t wait to be dismissed. Mom and Aoi are both stepping out from the desk, arms outstretched, but Izumi’s already running.

She bolts passed the living room and straight into the forest—the forest that was meant to be their prison, their graves-

Some of her family try to stop her, try to run after her, but Izumi has always been faster, always been different.

Maybe, in this, she is different too.

She’s the first fox born in decades, is the first to call magic with the ease of breathing in just as long. Maybe the curse doesn’t- Maybe it isn’t-

Izumi runs and runs and runs and-

And she slams painfully into solid air. 

Her nose breaks and blood streams down her chin along with her tears. She gets back up and does it again. And again. And again. And again. Until her nose has healed itself. Until she has instead beaten her arms against nothing so much that the bruises don’t.

She collapses against the barrier, sobbing and screaming and clawing at it because this isn’t right. She’s meant for more than this! The wind told her—promised her. She’s meant to rule the world and protect everyone and she can’t be trapped here!

She was made to be mighty.

Let her go!

***

Aoi finds her hours later with Nana Naoki behind her. Aoi probably asked them to help sniff her out.

Izumi’s quiet, curled up and small as she leans against the barrier. Her voice has long since gone hoarse from all her screaming and tear tracks have dried on her cheeks along with the blood smeared across her chin.

Aoi takes one look at her before scooping Izumi into her arms and holding on as tight as she can.

None of them say a word.

***

Later, when Izumi finds that her voice is working again, she will ask question after question. Most of them boil down to the same two things.

Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why am I so different?

(They don’t have the answers she wants. It reminds her of when she was small and asked too many questions about the wrong kind of things.

Izumi will eventually stop asking now, just as she had stopped asking then.)

***

At school on Monday, Izumi hardly speaks to anyone.

She’s spacey on the best of days, but this is just stupid. Every time Katsuki looks at her she’s staring off into space, her eyes sad and mouth pulled down at the corners.

Everyone asks her if she’s okay (because she has the whole school eating out of her damn hand) but all she says is that she’s fine, no need to worry! Just a little tired, that’s all! and smiles wide enough to trick those extras into leaving her alone.

Only Katsuki is smart enough to see through her bullshit, but all she does is stay infuriatingly closed lipped about it. So he drops it for the time being.

But then she does the same thing on Tuesday.

And Wednesday.

And Thursday.

When she comes in on Friday acting no different, Katsuki can feel the whole school starting to glare at him like it’s his damn fault.

And sure, last time she was maudlin and sad, he may have been going through that whole ‘learning about the supernatural’ thing and accidentally on purpose started avoiding her, but this time he hasn’t even done anything.

So he’s pissed off. He is done, okay? Katsuki gave her time to mope and shit about whatever it is that’s bothering her in the hopes that she’ll get it out of her system, but obviously that's not working. So now they’re going to do this his way.

The lunch bell rings and Katsuki is at her desk, glowering down at her and giving her one last chance to say something because he’s a pretty understanding guy. He’s never been much good at patience but Izumi does this shit for him so he at least tries for her.

But she just shrugs, and gives him one of those fake ass smiles she’s been given all the extras—the one that he hates and-

That’s the last straw.

In the next moment, Izumi is thrown over his shoulder.

She shrieks. “What are you-! Kacchan! Put me down right now!”

“No,” he says flatly, throwing both their bags out the open window and following after them a second later.

***

Izumi yells and squirms and slams her hands into his back the whole time, demanding he take her back to school and let her go. He does none of those things.

He’s pretty sure she could get out of his hold. Not easily, perhaps, but she could and she’s not actually trying to… so Katsuki figures she’s full of shit and doesn’t put her down until they get to the beach—the shitty corner of it where no one goes because it’s more trash heap than anything else. Here they can scream at each other without anyone overhearing or interrupting.

He dumps her on the sand.

“Kacchan!” she starts, but he cuts her off.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he demands.

“Wha- me?” she reels back, “You’re the one who kidnapped me off campus! We’re going to miss-”

She tries to move past him and he throws out his arm to stop her. “Shut up about class. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s ‘going on’, Kacchan.”

“Bullshit.”

The look she gives him is something he knows she picked up from him. The aggression playing on her face is too close to his own to be anything else.

“I don’t need your dorky ass, super-ears to know when you’re lying to me, Freckles,” he says firmly, crossing his arms and trying to glare him into submission. “So stop doing it and just spit it out.”

Her mouth opens only to close a second later. Her hands are in fists at her sides and if she were anyone else, Katsuki would think she was about to punch him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Tough shit. You’ve been not talking about it all week and now it’s time to spill your guts.”

They stare at each other, the moment stretching out like infinity between them, two stubborn fools digging in their heels and refusing to give an inch. And then, out of nowhere, Izumi bursts into tears.

“Shit!” Katsuki reels back, stupidly not having expected that reaction. He steps forward almost immediately after, arms outstretched before he realizes how stupid he probably looks and instead shoves his hands deep in his pockets. “Fuck. Shit. Freckles! Stop it, you goddamn crybaby.”

Izumi does not, in fact, stop crying—not that Katsuki really expected her too.

Instead she curls in on herself, sobbing even harder and—fucking dammit— he yanks her into a hug. She latches onto him like a leech, hands fisting the back of his school jacket and nearly tearing the fabric with how tightly she’s holding it. She presses so close to him, it’s like she’s trying to crawl into his ribcage.

Fucking foxes and their tactile needs.

He lets her do whatever she needs with only minimal grumbling and bitchiness. She buries her nose in the space between his neck and chest, presses her hands all along his shoulders, and doesn’t let him drop the hug until her tears slow down enough that she can talk.

By the end of the whole process, Katsuki is sure he smells more like a Midoriya than most Midoriyas. 

But whatever. Izumi’s always had weird as fuck coping skills. This isn’t exactly new.

When he feels her death grip on his shirt weakening he speaks again. “Are you done?” he asks flatly and, for whatever reason, Izumi chuckles.

“No, probably not,” she tells him honestly. He huffs, hands moving from her back to her shoulders and pulling her away just a bit, just enough to look at her face.

“What. Happened.”

Her breath stutters in her chest and she won’t meet his eyes. She stays quiet for so long that he’s just about to repeat the question when she finally speaks. But of course she answers so quickly—practically spitting into the air between them—that he doesn’t even understand what it is she said.

“Hah?”

She grits her teeth before going abruptly boneless, like all the fight has just drained out of her. Katsuki immediately hates how defeated she looks and has to stop himself from shaking her in some childish hope that it might fix that look on her face.

“I can’t be a Hero, Kacchan.”

Katsuki blinks and feels very much like he’s somehow missed the last step on the staircase.

Cause what?

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What crazy mirror verse has Katsuki suddenly found himself in that Midoriya fucking Izumi is actually saying the words ‘can’t’, ‘be’, and ‘Hero’ all in the same sentence?

Something must show on his face or his heart trips or some shit because she’s talking again without him having to prompt her. Well, it’s more like she begins word vomiting at him but she’s been doing that all five years he’s known her so he’s only a little annoyed by the habit at this point.

She spills everything. The story Nona told her and the realization and how the curse works. She tells him all about her running and using herself as a battering ram. About her questions and the nonanswers she got in return and about the way she feels like everything she’s ever known is shattered in pieces at her feet with no idea if she can even fix it, let alone how.

She’s crying again by the end of it, hiccuping little sobs and tear tracks on her cheeks.

Katsuki kind of wants to punch her in the face.

“So that’s it then?” he asks flatly. “You’re just gonna give up?”

Indignation rises slowly, then all at once, on Izumi’s face. Her eyes go hard and her ears are flat against her skull and she pulls her lips back to reveal all those too sharp teeth.

It’s a look he’s familiar with. More than anyone else in town, probably.

He pissed her off a lot in those early days. Dug himself in under all that sticky-sweet kindness, searching for some dark thing that just wasn’t there. She was patient and lenient and far too willing to put up with him, but every once in a while he’d push too far. He’d push and she’d snap right back at him with all the anger her pint sized body could hold and more; an invisible, crackling weight in the air around her that would press on him until he felt he couldn’t breathe.

(He remembers being caught off guard every time it happened. He remembers feeling victorious and guilty in the face of her rage. He remembers preferring it to the tears.)

Katsuki wouldn’t prefer it now except for the fact that he’s pissed to hell and making Izumi angry is just as much a catharsis for him as it is an improvement over the dead eyed look she had before.

Fuck. Izumi isn’t Izumi if she doesn’t have any fight left in her.

“I’m not giving up,” she practically snarls at him. 

His lips twist. “Sounds like you are to me.”

She sputters, mouth opening and closing without saying a word until, “Maybe you weren’t listening but there’s nothing I can do. I’m trapped! My whole family is trapped. Has been for generations and that’s not just going to change.”

“Not if you don’t do something about it it won’t.”

“Kacchan!” she yells, just on the wrong side of desperate, “There’s nothing I can do. We’ve been trapped here for more than a century. What? You think the whole skulk has just been sitting on their hands this whole time? They’ve tried but-”

“But you haven’t!” he shouts, flinging his hands out like that will force her to understand.

Instead she sputters, rolling her eyes. “And what can I do that the elders can’t? I’m thirteen. I haven’t even had my Witching Ceremony yet!”

“Are you a fox or not?” he shoots back. “Do you have magic or not? Have you been doing impossible things since the moment you were born or not?” he grabs her by the shoulders, staring down at her cause she’s always been short, and tries to force as much conviction in his voice as possible.

“You exist in spite of whatever shitty ass curse the skulk is under. Nothing about that makes sense. So stop whining about the thing you’ve already made your bitch just by fucking existing and start using you’re shitty-ass nerd brain to figure out a way to make it fuck off for good.”

Izumi’s staring at him, her eyes wide and swirling with too many emotions. He can read her like a book most days but not when that book is flipping through pages faster than he can keep up with.

He’s surprised she hasn’t started crying again; but then, maybe she doesn’t have enough tears left to cry. (Unlikely. If there’s an upper limit to Izumi’s tears they haven’t found it yet.)

“Do you mean it?” she asks. “Do you really believe I could do that?”

Katsuki scoffs. “Fucking obviously. I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”

Which is, you know, objectively a lie. He says a lot of shit he doesn’t mean because he’s an asshole and speaks before he thinks most of the time. Not that he cares, normally. If someone gets pissed off by the things he says, that's their problem, not his. 

But not this time.

He means it now. And he knows that Izumi knows it too.

Between one blink and the next Izumi is launching herself into his arms. She hits him like a goddamn cannonball to the chest, knocking them both onto the sand and probably giving him bruises.

He keeps swearing and yelling and trying to throw her off but she stays stubbornly attached to him, laughing like the little shit she is. It’s not until they somehow roll right into a wave does she let go, yelping and running back up the beach.

They’ve definitely already missed class, which he expected, so he doesn’t even think about it when he jumps up to chase after her for the next half an hour, yelling and screaming that he’s going to explode her face.

***

Kacchan was right, she knows, even if his delivery could use work.

She supposes that it’s a little bit her fault for being able to interpret his yelling so well that he never bothered to learn how to do anything else. He’s guilty of much the same when she talks fast enough that her words blur together and only he can understand and translate them.

Izumi has no idea how to go about breaking a century old curse, but Kacchan was right.

Impossible things are her specialty.

***

The first thing Izumi does when she gets home later, after her mom has finished yelling about skipping class, is find Nona. She hasn’t spoken to her in a week, not since she called for her presence, but Izumi seeks her out now.

“I want to learn magic,” she says, and it’s as close to a demand as any of them can get in regards to Nona. They are family first, but none would dare speak to the Matriarch the way Izumi does.

But Izumi’s always spoken to Nona the way no one else dares. Izumi herself will be Matriarch one day, will be mighty, and that means something in the here and now.

So instead of indignation or anger or anything else, Nona just looks at her with fond amusement and says, “Well it’s about time.”

***

Magic, Izumi quickly learns, is actually a lot more complicated than she thought it was.

She never had any reason to think it was complicated though. Magic has pressed down on her since she was a baby; has sat just beneath her skin, warm and familiar and waiting patiently for her to call it forth. Magic, for her, was like breathing, was like running. It was just something you could do.

But if magic is running, then Izumi is learning how the muscles move and how hard her heart pumps and about the oxygen she fills her lungs with in order to do any of it.

Nona and all the older adults—older, because Izumi and Katsuki are really the only non-adults in the skulk—spend most days drilling theory and rules and spellwork into her brain.

It is, all at once, the most interesting and most exhausting thing she’s ever learned about.

Izumi loves every tiring second.

***

They’ve been walking through the forest for most of the day. Izumi has her hand pressed against the barrier, leading the charge, while Katsuki has a fitness app open on his phone, using the route tracking feature to map out the curse’s area of effect. His eyes keep flicking from the screen to the barrier, which he can apparently only see when she’s interacting with it.

There were already a thousand and one questions whirling through her mind about shapes and sizes and apparent visibility.

Her knowledge of curses and magic in general is still novice, but Izumi’s a fast learner and Katsuki is at her side, working through their reliquary with the same stubborn determination she’s only ever seen him apply to his goal of surpassing All Might. She hadn’t thought he’d let her do this all by herself, but she also hadn’t expected him to throw himself so thoroughly into it either.

It’s… well. It’s really nice, actually. But she’s also curious as to why.

She asks him about it exactly once and the glare she gets for her trouble is withering.

“I don’t do shitty, half-assed victories,” he tells her. Which, yeah, she already knows that. She’s been to every one of his wrestling matches. She doesn’t see what he’s getting at here, saying things they both already know.

His mouth flattens, and he turns away, refusing to look at her as he continues, “I’m going to be number one, but if I don’t get there by going over you then what’s the fucking point? I won by default?” he spits the word with more disgust than she’s seen him have for most villains. “ Fuck that. You’re gonna stand there in second place because I’ve crushed you into the dirt fair and square, you go that?”

“Oh.” Izumi says, something warm bubbling in her chest. “I’m going to be number two?”

Katsuki frowns harder, if that’s even possible. “Fucking obviously. Who else would it be?”

And then Izumi’s grinning like he’d said something heartwarming instead of arrogant and vaguely insulting.

“I’m going to remember you said that,” she tells him seriously. “So that when they interview me for being the youngest hero to reach number one, I can make fun of you in front of everybody.”

Katsuki kicks her legs out from under her and laughs when she slams face first into a tree trunk.

***

The problem with reverse engineering a curse, is that there’s no set way for a curse to have been made.

Curses aren’t like regular spells with their linear causes to effects that they must travel along. They don’t have the same limitless freedom as Illusions, which are born of sparks that have no limit besides the caster’s own creativity, skill, and magical stamina, but they aren’t much better either.

Curses are like puzzle pieces, but ones that can fit in more than one place. Some combinations are inherently more stable than others, but it also depends on a caster’s ability to control and weave disparate pieces of magic into one another.

Which makes this whole endeavor all the harder. They can gather as many pieces and clues as they want and still be left with a missing piece that could be filled by five different things.

Their only saving grace is that the Takanshis were not well versed in curses, nor magic in general besides a chosen few combative spells and rituals passed down through the generations. The Takanashis didn’t have the skills to enact a more complicated curse by themselves. It makes some answers more likely than others, but it doesn’t truly get rid of any possibilities.

Somedays, when the answers seem so far away and Izumi stares at their reliquary bookshelves, all she can think about are the books that had been in the Takanashi vault. Had there been clues in the books they burned? Notes written in margins or journals with entries planning the attack. 

Were the answers they were looking for in the ashes Izumi made? Did she doom herself and her family to an inescapable prison because she hadn’t looked close enough? Because she hadn’t known?

The thought makes her feel cold, makes her feel sick.

On those days, Katsuki forces her to put the books down and teach him magic theory instead. He can’t do magic himself—doesn’t have the core for it and wouldn’t want to cultivate one anyway—but he likes knowing how the things he Sees work.

That, and being allowed to ramble about these kinds of things has always been grounding for her, which she’s pretty sure is the main point.

***

Izumi has always learned best from mimicry, from watching and analyzing how something is done so that she can repeat it herself. But besides illusions, she’s the only fox who can reliably call upon magic stronger than party tricks. 

She has the theories and as accurate a description her family can give her, but it is not the same. She cannot analyze the way the magic moves when a master uses it, cannot feel how it is meant to be shaped by better hands than her own.

Her control and precision suffer for it, and a unique type of frustration begins to build during her practical lessons.

She’s on the back porch biting back frustrated tears because she can’t even conjure a ball of light to sit in her palm without it exploding in her face when Gramps happens upon her. He’s the second oldest in the family after Nona and completely human, which means he doesn’t move or think quite like he used to, but he has good days.

Today must be one of them, because when he leans down to wipe her tears away with gentle, age roughened hands, his eyes are bright and clear. “There’s no need to cry now, ahuva. What has you so frustrated?”

“I can’t-” she hiccups. “It won’t work. I can feel it but it won’t work.”

She’s not making sense. She’s too upset to make any sense. She’s supposed to be powerful, supposed to be the next Matriarch—but all she is is frustrated. She can feel all this magic crackling at the edge of her senses, but she can’t get any of it to do what she wants.

 Gramps eyes her consideringly, and she’s not sure what she looks like, but it can’t be good. After a moment, he nods, like he’s come to some sort of decision, and taps his cane on the ground twice.

“Alright,” he says. “Then let's try something different.”

“Huh?” Izumi blinks, eyelashes still wet from crying. He’s holding out his hand to her, something expectant and fond in his expression. She’s confused, but she puts her hand in his and watches as he guides her fingers to rest at his wrist, almost, but not quite, against his pulse. His skin is almost ghostly compared to hers.

“Don’t try and do anything yourself. Just feel what I’m doing, okay?”

She nods, still confused, but she trusts him.

“Ha'er,” he casts and a light bursts, small but bright, in the center of his palm as she feels something press up against her own magic. Izumi gasps, eyes wide and flicking between the light and her fingers pressed against his wrist.

“Again,” she demands, paying more attention this time. 

Gramps doesn’t mention her lack of manners, just smiles and does as she asks.

Yes. Yes, that’s- of course! She lets go of Gramps’ wrist and cups her hands together, a wide smile on her face because she gets it. She gets it.

“Ha'er,” she casts and a light, stronger and larger than Gramps’ but still able to be held in her hands, blooms to life before her. She shrieks, laughing with joy.

She throws her arms around Gramps, careful not to squeeze too tightly, but she’s so overwhelmingly happy. She’s done impossible things like rewrite her best friend’s Name and speak with the wind, and yet conjuring a light in her palm feels like her greatest accomplishment ever.

“Thank you. Thank you so much.”

He hugs her back. “There’s no need to thank me. We are skulk.”

She nods. Breathes deeply the smell of soap and cedar, before pulling away. “How did you know to do that?”

“Call it a hunch,” he says, ruffling her hair. “You learn a great many things getting to my age. And you learn them in a great many ways.” As if to prove his point, he passes his hand over the light in her hand and leaves a dozen butterflies fluttering out from her palms in his wake.

She startles, leaning back on her heels as she watches them flit about in the air. “I - what? How did you do that?” she demands. That was not simple magic. Changing one thing to another is already not easy, but to make the inanimate living? She’d thought no one but her could do things like that under the curse.

Gramps smiles at her, bright and sharp. “There are advantages to being the only one in the family who is a Midoriya in spirit only.”

Izumi blinks. She’d never though about it before, because Gramps is skulk, is family, and blood or marriage doesn’t really have anything to do with it, but he’s a Midoriya the same way Katsuki is. He’d known Nana Naoki when they were young and been brought into the skulk even before Nana Naoki married their husband and had Auntie Umi and Uncle Hikaru and her mom.

“I’m fascinated by magic. As a young boy, I would fill entire notebooks with theories and ideas. Spells that could be adapted or changed. Experiments I longed to test. But my magical core was weak and hadn’t developed properly. I couldn’t attempt any of my experiments without putting myself in extreme danger. But then Naoki had their Witching, and no sooner had the celebrations ended that I found them at my door, glamor gone and offering me their power as my own, if I wanted it.”

“You were a kitsune-tsukai?” Izumi asks in surprise. One who enters into a pact with fox yōkai of any kind.

Gramps nods. “I’m not strong enough to do the kind of magic you’re learning. Not by myself. But I think I can help you if you help me too.”

She’s nodding before he even finishes talking, head bobbing so fast it’s liable to fly off.

***

At dinner that night, Gramps brings up his intention to help Izumi with her practical spell work, causing most of the table to pause in surprise.

Nana Naoki, who always sits on his right, gives him a look. “You hadn’t told me you wanted to do that,” they say, which makes the table go even quieter. It’s well known in the family that Nana Naoki and Gramps tell each other everything.

They’ve been best friends for decades, the kind of best friends she and Katsuki are. She and Katsuki are a lot like them in a lot of ways actually, (which Izumi doesn’t like thinking about for too long because if she does, then the fact that Nana Naoki is only six years younger than Gramps but physically is about half his age will make her cry).

“I’d only decided in the last two hours, dearheart.” He pats their hand reassuringly. “I also think it’d be wise to have her learn proper talismans under our lovely Aoi. Not just the seals we have young foxes learn.” Aoi, who’d been sitting at Izumi’s left, sits up suddenly at being mentioned. She shoots a look over at Izumi who can only shrug. Gramps didn’t say anything about talismans earlier. “Izumi has the mind for it, I believe, and it’d fix her problem with precision work.”

Nana Naoki frowns. “By doing it for her.”

Gramps tuts. “She has too much magic to ever be good at precision. Not unless she focused on it solely for the next twenty years. The talismans will cover her weaknesses, not aggravate them.”

Nana presses their lips together in something that’s not disagreement, exactly, but perhaps a stubborn refusal to be wrong. But Nona speaks before they can say anything.

“I think that’s an excellent idea, Hiromi. Aoi? Do you think you’d be able to spare the time?”

“Of course, Nona,” Aoi says, reaching over to ruffle Izumi’s hair. “I’d be honored to help.”

Izumi smiles, knocking her shoulder against Aoi. She thinks she’s gonna start liking practical lessons a lot more from now on.

Chapter Text

Izumi is learning magic the traditional way, studying for a whole year and a day before being presented to the Earth during her Witching.

Most of the things she is meant to be taught in that time was decided on long before. There are things she must know as a fox with such a powerful magical core, things she must know as Matriarch-to-be. Most things are planned for her to learn, but there are some things she can choose for herself.

Around the third month, she’s on a video chat with Yagi. That’s not terribly unusual, but the fact that he seems to be calling from a hospital room is.

She spends about five minutes fretting over him, pestering him with questions before someone—Recovery Girl, actually, and Izumi will definitely be freaking out over that later—takes the phone away and answers her questions quickly and efficiently.

“It’s good to know someone is worrying after this idiot,” Recovery Girl says dryly while Izumi can hear Yagi complain in the background. “He needs more people in his life.”

“Funny,” Izumi grins, “My aunts say the same thing.” She just knows that Yagi is blushing furiously now.

Recovery Girl’s lips quirk just a bit, and then she’s handing the phone back to Yagi with one final beration, quiet enough that had Izumi been human, her ears wouldn’t have picked it up.

“You better watch yourself, Toshi. That girl cares about you and I won’t be around to put you back together forever. Don’t do something stupid and leave her alone.”

There’s a lot in there to unpack, things that would make her blush, probably, but her mind gets caught up on the phrase ‘put you back together’. 

Izumi has been worried for Yagi since the moment she met him, and that’s only heightened since she learned of his injury and how far it all went. He’ll be injured the rest of his life, will keep getting more injured until he retires.

(If he retires, a traitorous part of her mind whispers. Izumi channels her inner Katsuki and tells it to shut the fuck up.)

But she could help with Yagi’s injuries, she realizes. Recovery Girl may not always be there for Yagi, but Izumi sure will.

It’ll be hard, and so much precision work that Izumi is likely to cry just thinking about it but, well. It’s Yagi. For him, she’ll learn whatever she needs to.

***

Katsuki finds her in the willow clearing, the one where rikud mavet takes place. It’s where she does most of her practical spellwork, practicing the same motions and words over and over and over until she gets it right.

She says something about the magic being more settled here, but Katsuki can actually See the magic of the clearing and it looks far from fucking settled. But what the hell does he know? Magic’s Izumi’s specialty, not his.

She turns around the moment he steps into the clearing, probably been tracking his progress since he stepped into the woods, the fucking weirdo.

“Hi, Kacchan!”

He grunts as a greeting, standing close enough that she can bump her shoulder against his leg. “What’s this?”

Laid out all around her in the grass are books. Which is, in general, not all that strange. Izumi’s normally surrounded by books—they both are really, what with the curse research and keeping up with classes, and when Izumi isn’t busy with the other two, she’s buried in spellbooks.

The strange part is that she has them in the clearing. The clearing is for practical magic, not theoretical.

She must be ansty, he thinks. Or frustrated.

Izumi sighs, and leans more heavily against his leg. He thinks about moving and letting her overbalance just to watch her sputter, but she starts talking before he can decide. “Anatomy books. Nana Naoki is forcing me to memorize diagrams before they allow me anywhere near healing magics. They say it’s important to build strong foundations.”

Katsuki blinks. “Healing? That’s what you picked?”

“Yeah. I’m picking up talisman work pretty quickly according to Gramps, and now that my practical work is almost completely caught up to where it needs to be, Nona said I’m free to learn whatever I’d like. Of course, this is complicated and realistically impossible to learn in nine months, so I’ll still be learning under Nana Naoki until we leave for UA. and probably a while after that.”

“No, wait- back up, Freckles. You blow about as much shit up as I do and you want to learn healing magic? I’m no expert, but ain’t that the opposite effect one generally goes for?”

Izumi scowls up at him and pinches his calf in warning. “I’m getting better,” she sniffs. “And I won’t be doing practicals for a while anyway. The talismans really are helping and so is Gramps showing me the way the magic is supposed to move. I still have some trouble with letting too much magic out by myself, but I’m working on it.”

Katsuki hums at that for lack of anything to say. Izumi though, has never lacked for words and continues in his silence. He settles down on the grass next to her, chin propped in his hand and listens as she lectures on magical theory and the odder pieces of human anatomy.

***

Nona’s making her translate horrible things in Hebrew—which Izumi thinks should qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. It doesn’t even share a root language or alphabet with either of the languages she already knows!—when Katsuki asks.

“Why do you guys use Hebrew anyway?” Katsuki asks from over her shoulder. “Isn’t Sanskrit the common magic language?”

“It is,” Izumi confirms, fixing the corrections Nona had marked in red. Her paper looks a bit like someone had a nosebleed over it, but this is the least red she’s gotten a translation back yet so the influx in boring translation work the past two weeks has paid off she guesses. “But Hebrew was the first language our ancestors spoke and used for guiding magic so we’ve just… kept using it,” she shrugs.

Nona says it’s a reminder of where they came from. Of the desert their family was born of before they'd been forced to leave. Their legends are Japanese, their cousins’ Chinese and Korean, but their roots are back in Persia—or at least what had been Persia during its first empire—and they haven’t forgotten them.

She stares down at the dark skin of her arms, the same kind of dark her whole family is, even after centuries of living in Japan. Blood is magic, her mom had said, pressing their palms together when she was young, and magic breeds true.

“Huh,” Katsuki says, and Izumi wonders how he must feel being so removed from his own history. How light must his shoulders be, without the weight of his ancestors upon them? How lonely? “At least your talismans are in Japanese.”

She makes a rueful little half smile. “At least there’s that,” she agrees.

***

“Okay. This is getting a bit ridiculous now,” Uncle Kyo says to the room at large when Izumi once again enters the back door covered in dirt and dried blood. Mom is crying as she fusses over her, wiping away blood from already healed wounds. She never doesn’t cry, no matter how many times Izumi comes home like this.

And, unfortunately, she does it kind of a lot. Things like this are kind of common since they are settled neatly over the largest ley lines in Japan. But she agrees that this is getting ridiculous. The amount of yōkai wandering onto their land has increased with no visible cause as to why.

Yōkai flock to them, but not in such numbers or frequency.

Aoi, who leans over mom to ruffle her hair but suddenly thinks better of it after seeing the dirt, asks, “Why are you always the one to stumble across our newest magical pest?”

“It’s not like I’m going hunting for them!” she protests.

Everyone in the room gives her a look. No one’s forgotten the vampire debacle.

Izumi huffs and pouts at everyone for the rest of the night. You put yourself in the middle of a few schoolyard arguments and make one stupid decision and suddenly you’re looking for trouble everywhere.

***

They’re approaching the last few months of middle school and will need to begin applying to high schools soon. Katsuki’s become kind of obsessed with the entrance exams they’ll need to take and created an exhaustive study schedule for them so jam packed that Izumi wonders if he remembered that the two of them do, in fact, need to sleep.

When she asks him why all the effort, his response is basically, “Because we’re going to get the highest scores in the country.”

Izumi blinks at him. “Why, exactly? Musutafu only has the one school. There’s ten other people in our grade and we’re the top of the class… by a lot. We’re going to get in.”

He snorts derisively without looking up from the planner he’s color coding (and he calls her the nerd). “Freckles, we’re not going to Musutafu high school. We’re going to Somei.”

“Uh,” she says dumbly. “What?”

“Somei Private Academy is one of UA’s sister schools. If we get into Somei, we're on UA’s radar. And if we’re on they’re radar, we can impress them before we even take the entrance exam.”

“That sounds great, Kacchan.” She pauses meaningfully. “But I can’t attend Somei,” she reminds in case he’s somehow forgotten she’s still cursed.

“They offer online options for extenuating circumstances. You just have to be among the top applicants—which we will be—and then submit a form after acceptance.”

Izumi opens her mouth, closes it. He’s thought this out, probably already has the forms and applications bookmarked on his laptop. Of course Katsuki has everything planned out and prepared while she never even thought to look. After learning about the curse, she’d ruled out any high school but Musutafu’s as an option.

“What about the other sister schools?” she asks after a moment. “Are we applying to them too? It wouldn’t hurt to be careful.”

Katsuki scowls, pressing harder into the paper. “The other schools don’t have online options. Not for the full three years, anyway. Most have dormitories instead. It’d be a fucking waste.”

“Oh,” she says sadly. Then, trying to be more upbeat. “Well, not a total waste. You can still apply for them, can’t you?”

Katsuki stops moving completely at her words. She doesn't even think he breathes. Which concerns her enough to reach out for his wrist. He jerks beneath her hand. 

“Kacchan?” she asks, alarmed.

“Absolutely not.”

“What?”

“I’m going to get into Somei,” he states, tense and determined. “Why the hell would I apply to any other school?”

Izumi stares at him for a moment longer, lips pressed into a thin line. He’s hiding something, gaze turned away and refusing to look at her.

“Okay, Kacchan,” she agrees, giving his wrist one last squeeze before letting go. He’ll tell her what it is when he’s ready.

***

Whatever free time they might’ve had before is quickly taken over by studying at the library. It’s not unusual to see them there, since Izumi is a permanent volunteer for story time on the weekends and drags Katsuki along every once in a while, but it is unusual for them to be there so often and studying no less.

Before they would only study at the Manor or Katsuki’s house because Katsuki liked to pretend he maintained the top spot in the class without actually trying. An appearance he’s decided to give up, apparently, in the approach of Somei’s Entrance Exam.

Which catches the attention of… everyone, basically.

Izumi can hear people whispering about them, wondering what the two prodigies know about the upcoming exams that no one else does. She listens as their classmates steadily work themselves into a panic over the next week until Hiro, who’s perhaps the most unruffled person Izumi knows, finally walks up and asks her about it. By the end of the conversation, Izumi hopefully quelled enough of the rumors to stop whatever breakdown her classmates were gearing up towards and ended up inviting Hiro to join in on the next study session since he needed help with English.

Katsuki probably won’t be totally happy about that when she tells him, but he’ll get over it. Besides, English is her subject anyway so it’s not like he’ll have to do any extra work.

***

Katsuki ends up having to do extra work, because of course Izumi can’t just invite one person. 

With Hiro, comes his best friend Mahalia and his girlfriend Yuko. Then those two invite Sumiko and Masato who are notoriously terrible at math, and at that point more than half the class is showing up to these things and “it’s just not fair to exclude the others Kacchan!”

They almost end up getting kicked out of the library when Katsuki shows up to find their table overflowing with people. No studying gets done for the first twenty minutes because he’s too busy beating the shit out of his bleeding heart of a best friend.

He’s going to have to rearrange their whole study schedule now. No way the extras can keep up with the pace he and Izumi had been setting and like hell is Katsuki letting them fail. If they fail, he fails, and Bakugou Katsuki doesn’t fail.

***

They don’t all meet everyday, of course.

Well, she and Katsuki do, but they’re trying for one of the most difficult high schools in the country and also never learned how to be casual about anything.

Everyone else meets less frequently. Mostly showing up on whatever day Katsuki planned to go over the subject they need the help on or just to hang out quietly. Izumi takes the lead for English, history and literature, while Katsuki prefers smacking their classmates with a flyswatter whenever they say something particularly offensive about math or science. It is… more effective than you think.

***

Izumi is working on talismans like Aoi’s been showing her while Katsuki checks over her math homework, her chem equations stacked neatly at his side to be done next. “Incoming,” she warns about three seconds before Aoi slams her door open with a loud bang.

Katsuki still jumps despite the warning and Izumi flinches at the loudness.

“We’re going to the beach,” she says without preamble, darting in to grab Katsuki’s ankle and yank him off the bed like she plans to just drag him the whole way there. Katsuki, of course, starts kicking and trying to dislodge her immediately so Izumi is forced to wait patiently for the two to stop swearing at each other long enough that she can get a word in edgewise.

“Why?” she asks quickly the moment she can. She was going to point out that they were busy with work, but she thinks Katsuki already made that point abundantly clear.

“Because it’s the weekend and the two of you have had your heads in this book or that one for weeks. You guys need a break. Whatever you’re studying for will be here when you get back. Pretend to be kids for once!”

And, well, she might have a point. Between school, magic lessons, the curse breaking everyone pretends not to know about, aikido, gymnastics, volunteering around town and taking care of whatever new things popping up in the woods, Mom has been fussing about Izumi working too hard.

This will probably ease Mom’s mind a bit. And besides, Izumi actually likes the beach, so. Why not?

***

They spend a whole forty minutes building sandcastles and laughing and chasing Katsuki into the water before Aoi’s plan backfires.

It’s not anyone’s fault really, but they get too close to that one part of the beach that’s become a dumping ground. It’s where Katsuki took her that day he yelled her back into being a Hero. She’d had more important things on her mind at the time, and admittedly still does, but she decides, right there on the sand, that she’s going to clean it up.

There’s something… important about accomplishing this, though she doesn’t know what that is.

She turns to Katsuki to tell him about it, but he’s already glaring at her. “I’m not helping you with this.”

“Okay,” she says, already rearranging their schedules in her head. (They both know he’s going to help her, at least a little bit, but Izumi will let him pretend, as she often does.)

“Ugh!” Aoi groans, draping herself over Izumi’s shoulder and getting sand all along Izumi’s back. Izumi wacks her with her tail in retribution. “I brought you here to relax, not to put more shit on your plate.”

“Helping people is relaxing,” Izumi argues. “It makes me happy.”

Aoi’s chin lands on head with a gusty sigh. “Whatever, you freaky little workaholic. Let’s go get some mochi. By the power vested in me as the legal adult for this outing, I say you’re not starting this new project until at least tomorrow.”

"Okay," she agrees easily.

It is, in Izumi’s opinion, a pretty good day.

***

The time for Entrance Exams finally rolls around. Her classmates seem confident; an example Izumi tries to follow, but she’s little more than a tightly wound ball of nerves the day of testing, much to Katsuki’s annoyance. He probably takes it as a personal insult that she didn’t walk fully confident she’d pass Somei’s exam.

Which, if it’s any consolation, she certainly walked out knowing she passed, but that’s still not enough. In order to attend Somei, she needs to do more than just pass. A feat she won’t know if she achieved for another two weeks. 

Her classmates are lucky, she supposes. Musutafu is a small town and it only takes waiting for Monday to roll around before they all get their scores. Their first period quickly devolves once they’re handed out and their homeroom teacher proudly informs them exactly how high they all scored.

“The highest testing grades we’ve seen in years . Congratulations, all of you!”

She and Katsuki are quickly overrun by thankful classmates and nothing really gets done the rest of the day. By lunch, most of the town knows about the scores and a potluck had somehow been arranged—probably by Mahalia, if Izumi had to guess.

Katsuki grumbles about the whole thing but she knows he’s terribly pleased with himself. And the whole thing takes her mind off her own results for a while, too busy celebrating and congratulating her classmates' successes to worry about her own hanging in the balance.

But then the day ends. And there’s still eleven more to go.

***

The days drag on like syrup and Izumi knows she’s starting to worry her family with how frazzled she’s been.

Katsuki tries distracting her, mostly with their other projects but he’s only about half-successful. Even their magic experiments—something they’ve begun doing since she’s picked up talisman work and started gaining better control—aren’t always enough to pull her out of her own head. Which is how she nearly burnt down the tree in the Bakugou’s backyard. 

(Mom was not happy about that and she accidentally got Katsuki in trouble with Aunt Mitsuki.)

Yagi’s calls help, because Izumi pays him all her attention whenever they get the chance to actually talk , but they’re infrequent. Also, Yagi doesn’t quite understand the situation and that makes Izumi guilty. He’s so proud and utterly sure she got into Somei and thinks the reason she needs to attend online is because they don’t have the money for her to attend in person.

So, of course, he keeps offering to pay for everything. 

And it’s very sweet, and Izumi doesn’t even think of it as an imposition because she knows Yagi has more money than he knows what to do with and enjoys spoiling her when he can, but she doesn't know how to explain how not a problem that is without giving away the secrets she’s not allowed to tell.

So Yagi helps, but he also makes it worse—just a bit.

Which leaves Aoi, who will take one look at her staring off into space, push her over, and say, “Grab you’re leo, we’re going to the gym. No arguing,” before promptly dragging her out the door, regardless of what either of them were doing.

Which is how Izumi finds herself doing splits and aerial somersaults Saturday morning under the hawkeyed gaze of Madame Riza, award winning gymnast and owner of Mustutafu’s only gymnasium. She’s in her fifties with streaks of silver in her blond hair, long since retired but no less terrifying for it. She runs her gym like a drill sergeant and even her least dedicated students could medal if they ever decided to compete.

Izumi’s kind of half in love with her if she’s honest. The other half is terrified.

She’s in the middle of a floor routine, trying to get the transition from her back handspring into a split right when her name is suddenly called. It distracts her enough that she over rotates and ends up slamming her back into the mat.

She stays there for a second, glaring mutinously up at the ceiling, before Aoi’s grinning face appears over her. “Get up.”

“Why?”

“Because your boy is waiting outside for you,” Madame Riza says from somewhere to her left.

Quickly, Izumi scrambles to her feet to face her properly. A gymnast must have grace and poise at all times, according to Madame.

Madame Riza stops in front of Izumi, back pin straight and mouth twitching just slightly at the corner. “He’s yelling.”

“He always yells,” Izumi tries to reassure her, even though Madame Riza knows Katsuki well enough to know that. She also certainly knows him well enough to know him as something other than ‘your boy’ but correcting the Madame just isn’t done.

“I expect to see your floor routine finished by next practice.” 

“Of course Madame.” Izumi was supposed to have another two weeks to finish that routine.

Before Madame Riza can demand any more unreasonable tasks of her, Izumi dips into a quick bow and drags Aoi towards the side doors where, now that she’s paying attention, she can hear Katsuki yelling. Halfway there, Aoi starts to run, dragging her along and slamming the door open so hard it bangs against the wall and almost hits Katsuki.

“Watch it!”

“No,” Aoi says, just to be a brat and then launches herself at him. “Do you have it? Where is it?”

“What the - Jesus - fuck!” he says, trying and failing to fend off her cousin as she starts rifling through his backpack. “Get the hell off me!”

“Aha!” Aoi shouts triumphantly, raising her prize in the air: a letter.

Izumi stops breathing for a second before also rushing forward to accost Katsuki. “Is it really?” Her hands land on his shoulders and their noses almost touch before he rears his head back out of range. He’s scowling and swatting at her, but doesn’t actually shake her off.

“Think I’m lying or something?”

Izumi grabs for the envelope in Aoi’s hand. “It’s early! They weren’t supposed to be here until Monday!”

“Who cares when it was supposed to arrive? Open it!” Aoi insists, practically jumping in place. Then, to Katsuki, “You too, brat.”

Excitement quickly turns to dread and Izumi abruptly feels like throwing up. Inside the letter she’s holding in her hands are the words that will affect her life for the next three years. At least.

“No. Nope, I can’t.” She shoves the envelope back at Aoi. “You open it.”

“What?”

Katsuki grabs her hand and pushes the letter back to her. “Don’t be stupid, Freckles. Just open the damn letter.”

“But what if I failed, Kacchan?”

“Literally impossible. We studied together.” He shoves the letter at her harder. “Open it.”

She bites her lip, “Open them at the same time?”

Katsuki rolls his eyes, but pulls his own letter out of his back pocket. “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

With Aoi watching like a hawk from over her shoulder, the two of them break the seals on their envelopes, but when Katsuki moves to pull his out without pause, Izumi hesitates. It’s only for a second, wary of Katsuki yelling at her again, before she closes her eyes and yanks the letter out and opens it.

Taking a deep breath, slowly, Izumi opens her eyes and reads.

Dear Ms. Midoriya Izumi,

Congratulations! It is with great pleasure that we inform you of your acceptance to Somei Private Academy. You achieved an entrance exam score of 912/990, placing you within the upper fifth percentile of applicants and granting you access to additional facilities and services should you require them.

We’ve enclosed additional information with this letter to better prepare you -

Izumi stops reading at that point, too preoccupied by Aoi screaming in her ear and shaking her like a ragdoll. She’s crying of course, but she’s also smiling so wide it hurts and when she looks at Katsuki, his grin is wide enough to rival her own.

***

If Katsuki ever has to deal with a púca ever again, he’s going to break something - hopefully the púca’s creepy little neck. Because this? This is bullshit.

They’ve been spending the last two hours dealing with some shitty rat spouting nonsense riddles and making a stupid, snickering noise when Katsuki swears at it.

Katsuki was well on his way to being pissed, while Izumi is lingering somewhere around frustrated and annoyed. Which was strange, considering she doesn't normally get worked up unless there’s a yōkai in town putting people in danger on purpose. Púcaí may be tricksters, but they aren’t malevolent as far as Katsuki knows.

But hell, maybe she’s just as annoyed as he is by the fucker. Even her patience had to have limits.

She’s sitting on a log now, half-resigned to the whole thing, while Katsuki paces behind her like a caged lion, snapping his teeth and growling at the air around him. They can’t actually go anywhere. The supernatural fog surrounding them makes sure of that, walking them in circles until they end up right where they started.

Katsuki feels like a rat in a maze and it’s pissing him off.

Which is why, the moment the púca steps out of the fog, Katsuki launches himself at it before it can even open its mouth. It poofs into a cloud of smoke before he can wring its shitty neck, reappearing next to Izumi on the log.

“Naughty, naughty,” the púca tuts, lips stretching wide and unnatural across its vaguely rabbit-like face as it wags a finger at him. “Bad behavior earns no treats.”

“I’m not a fucking dog,” he growls, hands pop-pop-popping to the beat of his anger.

The púca ignores him of course, acting like he’s not even there. “Traps are tricksy things. Tricksy things for tricksy foxes.”

“Could you get to the point?” Izumi snaps, glaring out the corner of her eye. “You’re not making sense.”

“Foxes make bad pets. Too wild. Foxes do not belong in cages.”

Katsuki scoffs. “You’re the one trapping us, fuckface. Just let us out if it upsets you so damn much.”

The púca tilts its head a full ninety degrees to regard him with its golden eyes, bright and unnatural against the bed of its black fur. “Peafowl have too many eyes to act so blind,” it tuts disappointingly.

“Fuck you,” he spits.

“Proud, testy creatures are peafowl,” the little rat-shit tells him, sounding almost amused.  “Peafowl do not play well with others.”

“Me and Kacchan get along fine,” Izumi defends before he can say anything. “Stop provoking him.”

The púca narrows its many eyes at her, then him, before swiping its unnaturally long forelimbs over its face and ears a few times, much like Katsuki’s seen real rabbits do. “A cage of gold is still a cage, no matter how pretty it gleams,” it seems to settle on saying. “Foxes do not belong in cages.”

Izumi blows out a loud breath, moving her bangs with the force of it. “If you’re talking about the curse, we already know. We’re working on it.”

“Foxes are clever. Foxes are quick. Foxes are not prey.”

“We know,” Izumi snaps, and she’s starting to sound angry now. Angry and frustrated and probably only a few minutes from crying as the emotions in her chest overflow. If this púca makes her cry, Katsuki’s going to turn it to ash.

“So what changes a fox into that which is not a fox at all?”

“What?” Izumi startles at the question. “You can’t stop being a Fox.”

The púca hums neutrally. “Were born of foxes, were raised by foxes, but were not foxes themselves. Never foxes themselves.” The púca pauses, thinking, then nods slowly. “Not foxes. But should have been.”

“Should’ve - hang on. Are you saying the curse isn’t killing us but just… turning us human? Is that even possible?” She turns to look at him, but Katsuki just makes a face at her and shrugs. Fuck if he knows.

“Blood is magic,” the púca says heavily. “Magic breeds true.”

He watches as Izumi’s face goes pinched with confusion, brows furrowed and lips turned down. “Magic breeds true,” she repeats. “Magic breeds… the curse is taking our magic? So much that it’s changing us? How? Where’s it going? What’s the curse doing to it? It can’t just be released back into the-”

“Better question,” Katsuki interrupts her train of thought before she gets too far. “Why take the magic in the first place? They’re Hunters. Wouldn’t they have just tried to kill you?” He scowls, thinking about the hidden reliquary and all the ‘trophies’ the Takanashis had crammed inside.

Izumi frowns, sad and angry all at once, and he knows she’s thinking the same thing. “You’re right. That doesn’t seem like something they’d do at all.”

“Curses are tricksy things,” the púca says, then, far more pointedly, “Hunters are not tricksy things.”

Katsuki stares down at the púca for a long moment, Izumi just as silent, before he suddenly bursts out laughing.

“Kacchan!” Izumi admonishes, probably because she doesn't think he should be laughing, but - fuck. This is hilarious in that kind of way that if he doesn’t laugh, he’s going to slam his head into a tree as hard as fucking possible.

The Takanashis fucked up the curse they tried to place on the Midoriyas? Are you shitting him?

Some fucking hunter legacy they were. No wonder they’re all six feet under.

Izumi sighs, hands scraping through her hair roughly. Her curls stick up oddly in their wake. “Okay. Okay. You told us all this stuff, but what are we supposed to do now? How do we break the curse?”

The púca hums neutrally, eyes twinkling.

“Come on,” Izumi whines. “You’re supposed to help people! Help us!”

Katsuki gives her a look. “It’s been trying to help us?”

Izumi pauses, then shakes her hand in a so-so gesture with a grimace. “Púcaí are wise. But they’re also unreasonable tricksters who make people work for the advice they give.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose, and thinks, briefly, of just blowing up the damn rat so he can be done with it all. “Work for - fucking fine . It told us how the curse works, which probably means the way to break it is somewhere in its mess of ass-backwards riddles.”

Izumi nods. “Yeah, okay. Let me just… so the curse steals our magic. In the beginning that meant it… killed us from the lack of magic, and now it means that it’s harder to call upon magic at all—which is probably just the curse deteriorating naturally, which isn’t uncommon. The Takanashis likely believed that ripping out our magic would kill us, which it did, but that magic has to go somewhere. It can’t just be left out in the aether, we’d either just reabsorb it or it would wreak havoc on the natural order. So, if the Takanashis are smart-”

“Which we already know they weren’t,” Katsuki interrupts.

“If they were smart,” she repeats pointedly. “They’d have an anchor for the spell that’s holding all our magic in it. But since onyx is the only thing I can think of that doesn’t have any discovered upper limit for holding magic—which I doubt they used, it would have to be a perfect sphere and the Takanashis were no experts in material manipulation—whatever they used is probably growing too full after absorbing three… maybe four generations of magic?”

Katsuki narrows his eyes. “Wait. Are you saying that the skulk’s magic is just… out there somewhere?”

“It’s probably somewhere within the barrier actually,” she ponders absentmindedly. “It’d have to be in order to be an anchor. And I also don’t think the magic it took could cross the barrier if it was since the magic is us and we can't cross. Well, actually hold on - can I manipulate things outside the barrier? We never tested-”

He slaps a hand over her mouth. “Freckles, shut the fuck up. Focus. All the magic that the Takanashis took from the skulk is somewhere nearby . We can find it, and when we do, we can take it back. You wouldn’t just be free, your family would have their magic back.”

Izumi’s eyes widen as the púca snickers, showing off its rows and rows of needlepoint teeth. “Clever peafowl.”

She pulls his hand off her mouth, holding his wrist in her two hands. “Do you think that’d take care of the barrier too?”

His lips twist as he thinks about it. They’ve been assuming the barrier was a part of how the curse functions up until now, like a plastic bag slowly suffocating you. But if the curse is stealing their magic in order to hurt them, then the barrier might be something extra placed over the whole thing just to keep the Midoriyas close to what’s hurting them.

He doesn’t say any of that though, because it doesn't actually answer the question and he’s sure Izumi already figured that out anyway. So, instead he says, “It fucking better. If I have to do more work after going through all this shit to break a generational curse, I’ll explodo-kill your face, you got that?”

Because Izumi is an insane person, she smiles at that and gives his wrist a squeeze before letting it go. “Of course, Kacchan.”

***

For the first time in their efforts to break the curse tying Izumi to the land, it feels like they have a solid lead. That, paired with their acceptance into Somei? Izumi’s been walking around on cloud nine and, apparently, he’s been smiling so much he’s been scaring the first years.

The school year ends with high spirits. Finals go the same way entrance exams had, with he and Izumi crushing the scores and the extras doing better than normal. That tall girl—Mahalia, Izumi keeps telling him—throws an even bigger party to celebrate their successes and the beginning of their last break before high school.

With their high school plans set and a solid direction to finally go in for the curse, Katsuki relaxes just a bit. He and Izumi turn their focus onto their other projects and how best to utilize their new free time. They have nearly the whole month planned out by the time his parents finally deign to mention how they’re ruining everything.

They want to visit some stupid hot spring in Kinosaki. They’ve been planning it ever since he started talking about Somei, apparently. It’s meant to be a reward for getting accepted.

The moment those words leave his dad’s mouth Katsuki throws a tantrum like he hasn’t in years.

He outright refuses to go, swears and screams and rages like the world is ending. It’s such an intense reaction and so unexpected, that he’s already running out the back door before his mom even thinks to yell at him.

An hour later, Izumi finds him sitting beneath a tree sporting scorch marks and surrounded by half burnt wood chips. She doesn’t say a word to him, just sits next to him close enough that their shoulders press together.

There’s no way she hadn’t been able to hear him the moment he started yelling—probably before it too, if he’s being honest—which means she waited. She let him be pissed for just long enough that the anger curled in his chest didn’t blaze so brightly anymore and she could touch him without coming away burned.

He barely knows where that moment is himself and yet Izumi finds it again and again without fail. It’s freaky how well she can read him.

They sit in silence for a long time. So long that Katsuki eventually speaks just to fill the space.

“What’s so good about a stupid hotspring anyway?” he spits at his feet, shoulders hunching all the way up to his ears. “We have the bath house in town, don’t we?”

Izumi hums thoughtfully at his side. “I think they want to spend time with you.”

“They can spend time with me here.”

“But it’s not a vacation if you stay here,” she points out kindly.

He slams his fist into the ground, jolting her at his side. “I don’t need some stupid vacation, Freckles!” he snaps. “I need to stay! We have shit to do here. Important shit. I can’t just sit on my ass in some stupid mountain spring.”

“It’s alright, Kacchan. I’ll still be here to look for the container.” He’s not sure what kind of face he makes at those words but whatever it was, it makes her go quiet. Then, after a long moment, tentatively say, “You know, just because I’m trapped, doesn’t mean you need to be, too.”

Katsuki sputters, rearing as if she slapped him. “Wha- as if! I’m staying back cause we’re busy. We just got a lead about the curse. I’m not-”

“Kacchan,” she interrupts, her hand gentle on his arm. He almost wants to shrug her off, to growl and hiss and snap because he hates when she sees through him so easily. Hates that her eyes get all big and understanding and that she’s too fucking kind for her own good.

Sometimes he wants to crush her like a bug when she does this. Wants to rip all the gentleness in her chest so she’ll stop making him so weak for needing it.

“I’ll be fine,” she says, staring into his fucking soul with those giant eyes of hers. “I promise.”

His chest aches as he stares at her. It’s the same ache he has when he thinks about the cage she was born into and about having to stand at the starting line of the rest of his life alone. Like his chest is overfull with some emotion he can’t be arsed to name.

“Think pretty highly of yourself, huh? Believing that you’re the reason I don’t want to go.”

“Maybe,” she says, sliding her hand down to play with the binding at his wrist. It’s similar, and yet so different from her own. “Do you think you can take pictures while you’re there? I think I’d like to see it even if I can’t go.”

“Hah? Who the hell said I was going?”

She blinks up at him. “Please, Kacchan?”

He turns away, scowling out at the woods around them. “Whatever,” Katsuki grumbles. “But next year you’re gonna take your own damn pictures, got that? I ain’t your errand boy.”

***

Katsuki goes.

Izumi isn’t upset about it, really she isn’t. She’s not angry or jealous or anything her family thinks she’s entitled to feeling.

Mostly, she just misses him.