Chapter Text
Hand in a glove, like bird on the wing,
Like bells in a belfry that endlessly ring.
There is an old saying, half-forgotten among the modern mothers of today's world, passed around frequently among grandmothers with their mumbling lullabies: that before we are born, the gods take a single red thread and tie it about our smallest finger, and the other end they tie about another's, somewhere in the wide and waiting world.
Some say the thread was never red, but clear as morning spring, but all of them knew, knew it to be — an invisible string.
The thread may stretch. It may tangle. It may even vanish beneath years of distance, but it does not break, and it does not lie. Sooner or later, it pulls taut, and two souls who were always meant to find each other are drawn, however clumsily, however crookedly, back into the same small orbit.
For most, the search is a lifelong odyssey, a tumultuous tracking of footprints through the wilderness of the world. Toiling and tattered. Desperate in it's search for a Great Love. Some must follow it across oceans. Others need only jump over a fence; lucky enough to have their destiny delivered right to their doorstep, wrapped in a bundle of blue blankets.
It was under the relentless gaze of that July sun that Inko Midoriya moved into the neighborhood, her belly rounded with promise of new beginnings.
Next door, Mitsuki Bakugo watched the moving trucks through a veil of cigarette smoke, a squirming, golden-haired little thing tucked against her hip.
"Look at that, brat," Mitsuki murmured, her voice soft the way it will no longer be when Katsuki grows up, and it carried on the stagnant breeze. "Looks like we're getting a neighbor."
Mitsuki did not know, then, that three doors down and one fence over, would become a place Katsuki will waste away his nights.
Fate rarely announces itself with fanfare.
It began, as so many disasters do, with a loaf of bread.
Mitsuki Bakugo had never been what anyone would call neighborly. She regarded casseroles-for-newcomers as a quaint custom practiced by women with more time than sense. But she had been standing at her kitchen window the week the moving truck came, flour to her elbows and a vendetta against an underproofed dough, when she caught sight of the new woman across the way.
Dragging in a box marked KITCHEN (FRAGILE) that was very clearly heavier than she ought to be carrying, given the unmistakable, round, telltale shape of her beneath her sundress.
Heavily, and without a husband in sight to haul a single thing who has never once needed to think it about her own -- banging the rolling pin down hard enough to send up a small cloud of flour, cursing every coward and every deserter and every sorry excuse for a man who'd ever left a woman to carry a life alone, box by box, step by step, with no one's hand at her back.
Upstairs, oblivious to the verdict being passed on his entire sex, Masaru was humming tunelessly along to the radio while he fixed a dripping tap he'd been promising to fix since spring. Good, steady, unremarkable Masaru, who had never in fifteen years let her carry so much as a grocery bag he could take from her first. She loved him without thinking to be grateful.
She was across the street within the hour, a loaf still warm enough to fog its own foil, and a tin of butter cookies balanced on top that she would later, under oath, deny having made specially.
"You're going to drop something carrying boxes like that," Mitsuki said, by way of introduction, thrusting the bread forward. "Sit down before you go into labor on your own welcome mat."
The woman blinked up at her and she saw her properly then.
Bright and startled green eyes, a kindness in her face Mitsuki had never before seen, and said, "Oh — I'm so sorry, did I — is the noise—"
"The noise is fine. Sit, would you?" Mitsuki barked, watching the woman lower herself onto the step with the great care.
"When are you due?"
"Mid July," Inko said, one hand still pressed flat to her belly, like she was holding something in or holding something up. "Or so they tell me. I've learned not to trust due dates too much."
"Smart woman." Mitsuki sat down beside her without being invited, because she had never once in her life waited for an invitation. "Mine was early. Couldn't wait to get out and wreak havoc as soon as he can, I s'pose. "
That earned a laugh like jingling bells in Christmas-time.
Mitsuki scoffed, a fond, rough chuckle escaping her at the sound of music. "The final stretch is the worst. Especially in this godforsaken humidity."
She started showing up on Tuesdays with whatever she'd baked too much of, then on Thursdays whether she'd baked anything or not.
Little did she know, as she scrubbed a countertop furiously, that this simple deed of good neighborhood charity would cost her.
She drove Inko to two appointments when the bus schedule didn't cooperate, sat in waiting rooms flipping through magazines she had no interest in, and once told off a nurse who'd used a tone she didn't care for. She helped paint a nursery the color of new leaves, both of them barefoot and spattered, windows open to let out the paint-smell and let in the cut-grass one; and for a few weeks there experienced girlhood for the first time.
She taught Inko which of the neighborhood shops would deliver and which were liars about it, and which nights the baby would kick hardest, and that swollen ankles needed saltwater.
Wretched and wonderful, Mitsuki Bakugo was, in those months. Wretched in her mouth and wonderful in her hands, the way her son would grow up to be.
And Inko, who had braced herself for a summer of carrying everything alone, found instead that she hadn't had to carry nearly as much of it as she'd thought.
Izuku was born exactly on the mid of July.
Spring sowed the heavens petal by petal into the land;
Summer gathered every star and placed it in another hand.
There is something sacred about a childhood shared. It's a gift, a blessing. Grown-ups fall in love by learning each other, about each other. Children love by simply sitting beside one another. Building kingdoms from cardboard boxes and declaring themselves rulers of imaginary seas. They hand over the last blue crayon without thinking much of it. Inventing languages no dictionary will ever preserve; fluent in a version of each other the rest of the world will never meet again.
What extraordinary faith it takes to believe a stick is a sword.
What greater faith to believe another child will always be there tomorrow.
In the space between "Do you want to play?" and "See you tomorrow", in pinkies hooking around each other; love blooms.
Eventually, the dinner bells will ring. Mothers will call them home, untangling their physical hands. They will walk away in opposite directions, drifting into their own families. They might even forget this afternoon entirely.
But the stars had rained from the sky the day a fiery little boy came into this world, sometime in spring with pink petals dusting down on pink cheeks, and white heavenly bodies into dust. It tucked each fallen star beneath beds of pink blossoms, asking the petals to keep them warm until July arrived. The flowers obliged, swaying gently above the sleeping glow, while roots grew in directions only the earth could understand.
Through summer rains, through rivers fattened by thaw, through bees dusted with pollen and winds perfumed with bloom, the starlight wandered.
Far across the expanse of weeks and miles as the earth spun on its axis another boy was born. By then, the pink petals had long since surrendered themselves to green leaves, yet somewhere, spring wanted summer. The blossoms remembered the stars, the stars remembered the boy, and the starlight they had carried all those months found its second heart.
For what mother expects, when her child is so small,
That one little hand could be reaching for all?
Inko would swear if you asked her, with the easy conviction of a woman who'd seen the boy grow into himself, that Katsuki Bakugo had been the most beautiful baby she had ever laid eyes on. While other infants were amorphous, doughy things, Katsuki was simply marvelous with his red cheeks and red eyes.
Bright and brilliant, that boy was, and not only to look at. He walked before he should have, spoke in full and furious sentences while other children were still pointing and grunting.
Mitsuki complained about it constantly and bragged about it more, which was, Inko had come to understand, simply how the woman expressed love.
And Izuku simply adored him.
It was a helpless, total adoration that Inko understood intimately, because she, too, was entirely obsessed with the boy. She was not alone in this, either.
Truth be told, the whole block was. Neighbors would linger by the Bakugo fence just to catch a glimpse of the striking child, whispering about his bright future like old townsfolk predicting the arrival of a young king. He was the undisputed sun of the neighborhood, and everyone naturally tilted toward his light.
But none so blindly as Izuku.
The playpen in the living room became a theater of devotion. Izuku would spend hours in a state of soft, giggling worship, his green eyes wide and sparkling as he tracked Katsuki’s every move. If Katsuki so much as stacked two wooden blocks together, Izuku would let out a breathless, tiny crow of delight, clapping his chubby hands as if he had just witnessed a miracle.
Precious praise for a proud, playful prince who tolerated this worship with a sort of magnanimous, royal grace.
He would sit amidst the plush toys, his tiny chest puffed out, occasionally tossing a plastic ball in Izuku’s direction just to watch the younger boy scramble after it with frantic, puppy-like joy.
Inko would watch them from the kitchen threshold, a damp dish towel pressed to her cheek. She loved Katsuki for the joy he brought her baby boy.
If she'd watched a little closer, perhaps she would've noticed the scarlet strings knotting around them.
Like rain finding rivers and rivers the sea,
He loved me as simply as breathing could be.
To Katsuki, the world was a collection of things that either belonged to him or hadn’t realized they belonged to him yet.
When other children at the park drifted too close, drawn by Izuku's easy laugh and softer hands, Katsuki planted himself between them with his small arms crossed and his small chin jutting out, daring anyone to try it.
Stubborn and savage in his small affections, that boy was, incapable of gentleness in the way other toddlers managed it, all soft pats and murmured coos.
He decided, unilaterally, which snacks Izuku was permitted to dislike and which opinions Izuku was permitted to hold, and bristled with genuine, red-faced outrage on the rare occasions Izuku disagreed with him. He bit a boy at daycare -- once, gloriously, never repeated, though Mitsuki told the story for years -- for the unforgivable crime of taking the seat beside Izuku at snack time.
He slept better, Mitsuki swore, on the nights Izuku stayed over, curled close enough that their small fists ended up tangled together by morning the way they had been tangled in a hospital bassinet.
When Izuku cried, which was often, because the boy was a soft, leaking faucet of tears, Katsuki would get angry. A bubbling, frustrated fury would wash over him. He would grab Izuku by the collar of his green onesie, pulling him close with a clumsy yank that was far too harsh for a toddler, shoving a teething ring into his face.
“Mine,” Katsuki would snap, his voice a gravelly, babyish demand. “No cry. Look at me.”
And Izuku always did. He would blink away his tears, his huge, emerald eyes focusing entirely on Katsuki, reflecting the blond boy like a mirror.
Katsuki did not know, that all he'll one day amount to, is a mere reflection in the soulful eyes.
That the most interesting thing about him, would be Izuku Midoriya.
Still, he liked the weight of Deku’s gaze. He liked knowing that if he stepped to the left, Deku’s head turned left; if he reached out a hand, Deku blindly followed.
He will like it for a lifetime to come.
The apple of my eye, the ace up my sleeve,
The love I'd defend and the boy I'd believe.
Izuku giggled as his mother tickled him, squirming away from her fingers.
"The sun rises in the east, and sets in the west baby," she admonished.
Izuku nodded as he repeated her.
But the sun as far as he knew, rose when Bakugou Katsuki smiled at him.
If Katsuki’s love was a storm, Izuku was a sapling that had grown sideways just to lean into the wind. He had not known a life without Kacchan.
He did not care that Kacchan was loud, or that his tiny hands were often too rough when they gripped Izuku’s wrists. The bruises from tumbled play sessions were not hurts; they were badges of belonging. When Kacchan shoved him down into the clover, Izuku only looked up at the sky and waited, breathless, for the golden shadow to block out the sun in the sky and pull him back up.
When Kacchan would yank him by the collar, baring his tiny teeth and demanding his absolute attention, a wave-like calm would wash over Izuku. The noise of the world, the barking dogs, the whirring lawnmowers, the chatter of the mothers -- all melted into a soft, distant hum. There was only the fierce, ruby glare of his idol.
“Kacchan,” he would babble, a soft, worshipful syllable melting on his tongue like sugar. He would reach out his small, freckled hands, his fingers instantly seeking the fabric of Katsuki’s shirt.
But no story half this sweet escapes its own shadow for long, and even ones like these — especially ones like these — know better than to end on sunlight alone.
For there is a thing the old stories never quite warn you about: that threads tied before birth only promise much. That a love discovered this early, this easily, before either boy had learned caution or cruelty or the cost of either, was bound to be tested by both before it was through.
Izuku had always felt it. Had always thought Kacchan was simply to bright to ever hold on to him, yet. Yet he stayed — a willing witness to his own wasting.
But the apple would rot.
(It's okay, he'll still have the seed.)