Crocs for Life

4

Dinner on your second night at the Midoriya household is a bit awkward. You know which blonde to blame.

Izuku picks at his food. Inko can't focus on her plate while her eyes are playing ping-pong between the children. You eat with gusto. Food is never to be unappreciated. A new childhood barely squatting over the poverty line only reinforced that belief.

Another consideration: how your existence will impact this family's finances.

Done with your food, you decide to dive into the problem right away. You give Inko a look. You are naming it the Provisory 'I need a translator' Look Nº1.

Hoping she will follow through, you just ask: "Izuku. Why are you upset?" Inko translates and you don't need to know Japanese to understand Izuku's denials. You snort. There's an expression but it doesn't translate well to English. "Please don't lie, it's obvious that you are upset at me, or about me. If you don't want to talk about it now, that's okay. But you should. It's not, hm, it's awful to feel angry. Saying something helps, even if it's to another person."

Inko translates that with pauses, shooting you uncertain looks. Izuku looks mulish and on the verge of tears.

Tears come from Inko's side of the family. Evidence A: Inko herself. Evidence B: Your direct paternal genetic ancestor. Evidence C: You, a notoriously crier, not having a single tear for the last couple of years. Counter-evidence A: Crocodiles, of which family's you are now part of.

Izuku succumbs to his genetic imperative to cry at the slightest emotional pressure. You doubt it's his high empathy in this particular case. Since you do not understand Japanese and Inko gets understandably caught up trying to talk with her son and reason her way through his minor breakdown, you end up staring at the wall.

A smartphone, that's what you need.

Inko manages to calm the situation down and explains, through her own tears, that Izuku had gotten very upset because of Bakugou. Not in those words.

Unfortunately, you get where this is all coming from. Kids get into their heads that a family is a mom and a dad. Some of them know that it can also be just a mom or a dad, or even rarer, two moms or two dads. Suddenly siblings because there's another mom that is not also their mom? It's not like there was a divorce and a single mom got together with a single dad.

In Bakugou's head, I was fake family. Izuku disagreed, rightfully. Then it turned around and became 'your dad doesn't love you or your mom and got himself a better family'! Which was painfully close to the mark, probably. You highly suspect that Izuku's quirklessness got brought to the table as well, considering it was Bakugou. Untrue, because you were conceived before Izuku was born, much less diagnosed. But emotionally? It had to ring very true to my new little... older brother.

You want to say something but Inko's red eyes are damning. Easy to forget this was the woman whose husband cheated on while she was pregnant. A husband who was not answering his phone and could very well be womanizing his way across several foreign countries at this very moment.

You exhale. No point in getting angry.

Short and sweet then.

First, you ask Inko if she is okay. She is fine, of course. Then you apologize and explain that you have opinions that might hurt a bit to hear, and that you can shut up and let her take the lead.

There's a moment where she just looks at you. You don't know what she expects to find. Even with a human face, you were an emotional wall. Opaque and unknowable. As a saurian, subtle mood indicators are all likely incomprehensible to a regular person.

To your surprise, she assents.

First, you tell her, and only her, that you're sorry and you are angry, because she got hurt. You like that you were born, but she shouldn't have had to be hurt.

To Izuku, it's a bit more complicated. Nobody can tell another person how to feel.

"I never had a dad. I never even met him. I can't miss what I don't have." In another life, maybe this would anger you, but again, your emotional reactions tend to be skewed. "A father only counts if he's there. He only loves you if he's there. So, to me, that guy was never a father in the first place. Just, ah, one of the ingredients that made me and made you. All the work was done by moms. So: that guy doesn't matter."

Inko manages to translated back Izuku's last, mumbled words. "Families are supposed to love you."

It makes you so mad. There's a lot of anger there. You were old when you learnt the truth of that matter in the world. And it shone so many ugly lights into seemingly innocuous memories.

You will never dispute that. You have never been able to just open your mouth and tell them: those people are not your family. You have never been able to push back against your own family, to lay down the lines you needed. Today, you do. You have a little older brother who needs you to.

"Your family is right here in this room. It's her and only her. If you want, me too. But nobody else." You are firm. Nobody else.